Deloitte's UK Mobile Consumer Survey 2016

Deloitte's publication of its mobile phone survey has plenty of interesting stats. Here are some that caught my eye:

• 4G adoption has more than doubled in the last year, from 25% to 54%.
• 31% of smartphone users make no traditional voice calls in a given week. This contrasts with a quarter in 2015, and just 4% in 2012. The substitutes are text messaging, instant messaging and social networks.
• The majority of survey participants have downloaded 20 or fewer apps.
• Smartphone penetration in the UK leapt from 52% to 81% of the population in the four years to May 2016, but further penetration is anticipated to slow to 2-4% in the next 12 months.

Number of SMS Messages sent falls - a point of no return

Gone are the glory days of SMS messaging when usage was exploding at 30% a year. Two reports show that 2012 was the zenith of SMS and more grim figures are to follow.

A Deloitte study reports that 145 billion SMSs were sent in the UK in 2013, down a sliver from 138 billion (a drop of a mere 5%). Users are substituting SMS with instant messaging services like WhatsApp, Viber, Snapchat and Facebook to stay in touch.

There were 160 billion instant messages last year and this figure is predicted to nearly double to 300 billion by the end of 2014.

This has occurred because instant messages (note that the apps listed above support images, video and even audio - quite a concept when you think about it! - between users) sent over data are free and group texting is easier (remember my own start-up providing MiCircles, faithful readers?)

The operators have already responded - SMS are virtually given away - except for the odd entry level contract where SMS packages are unlimited.

At similar, woeful story comes from Strategy Analytics (Operator Revenue from SMS, MMS on The Decline): global SMS & MMS revenue fell by almost 4 percent last year to just below $104 Billion. By 2017, 20% reduction in revenue is projected, with regions with a high penetration of smart phones set to see the biggest drop off in revenue: revenue in America is estimated to fall by 38% and an 28% drop in Western Europe.

Ofcom Report - July 2012

Ofcom's Communications Market Report is always full of stats. Here are a couple that I thought were interesting.

Fixed vs Mobile revenue

• Voice revenues declined, in contrast to data revenues. Fixed voice revenues declined by 4.9% in 2011 to £8.9bn, while mobile voice revenues fell by 0.9% to £10.5bn.
• Mobile messaging and handset data revenues increased 5.5% to £4.6bn.
• Fixed data revenues (broadband and narrowband) increased by 6.8% in 2011 to £3.4bn, with broadband contributing the vast majority. (All figures are retail.)

Voice

• The volume of voice calls shrank for both fixed and mobile telephony.
• The number of minutes of calls made from fixed telephones was down 10.0% in 2011, while the number of minutes of calls made from mobile phones fell for the first time: down 1.1% on 2010.
• For the first time, over half (52%) of all call volumes were made from a mobile.

Messaging

• People in the UK sent an average of 200 SMS and MMS messages per month in 2011.
• The average number of text and picture messages sent per UK inhabitant continued to increase in 2011, growing by 17% to 200 messages per month.

Broadband

• The total number of UK fixed broadband connections passed 20 million for the first time in 2011. 
• The number of mobile broadband connections passed 5 million during the year, and by the first quarter of 2012 76% of UK homes had a broadband connection of some description.

Mail (yes, indeed, this is included in the report!)

• Mail volumes have been falling consistently for the past five years, and declined by 25% between 2006 and 2011.
• Direct mail usage remains constant, in a failing market, meaning the its share of post is increasing.
• It is estimated that residential consumers send less than 10% of mail in the UK.

Free Web-based SMS - Old Skool!

Vintage stuff: the mighty Gizmo project is revisiting some dusty, long forgotten functionality: the ability to send text messages to mobile phones from a web page for free.

Remember when telco operators used to let any third party do this back 5+ years ago? They permitted this so that the recipient would hit reply thus generating usage. Sadly, only mobile operators themselves permit this through their own sites - and cap usage to a fairly meager daily limit.

It will be interesting to see if this takes off again - perhaps it will shove SMS into the mainstream in the US market.

In the meantime, you can send a SMS to my mobile / cell phone, by clicking on the Gizmo Logo above.

Jubii - Not quite, yet

Had another mess around with Jubii. I was hoping the service had improved after its launch a couple of weeks ago. Actually it was the comments in the blogosphere that clarified whether / how some of the functionality worked.

So, it comes from Lycos Europe, it's all Web 2.0:

• You get an email address. When you receive emails, they are divided between a public and private inbox based on whether the sender is in your address book
• Send SMS - not available yet
• VoIP (landline to landline, a la Jahah, rather than using PC's speakers + mic)- 30 mins of free calls per day to Austria, Canada, Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, UK and USA (an interesting mix of countries!). Each call is limited 5 mins. Free while in beta.
• Blogging, photo and file storage and sharing. You can selectively share content with your contacts like etribes or vox (10Gb storage for the first million users)
• Interconnects with AOL & ICQ messengers

Several key features are idenabled yet, launching SMS or VoIP is pretty unintuitive. IE7 reports errors from time to time. Overall, some of the concepts that it is aiming for make lots of sense, something that the original Midentity desktop application was aiming for.

It looks reasonably good, but it's buggy - I'd rather not right it off at this point in time - it might be revved up into something reasonable.

SMS predictations are revised upwards

Portio Research takes an optimistic outlook for Mobile Messaging Futures 2007 - 2012. It upwardly revises previous predictions from 2005 - SMS growth has not flattened out in mature markets but continued to boom whilst the US market has grown much faster than expected. By 2012, global SMS revenue will reach $67b, driven by 3.7 trillion messages.

The report states that just in Asia 450 people every minute will get their first mobile phone - and the adoption will tick along at this rate for the next 6 years.

Portio reckons that Mobile IM will supplant SMS as the principle messaging service by 2011. I strongly disagree - because IM currently requires opt-in. Admittedly, interconnectivity between IM providers has occurred technically, but the mass market certainly hasn't appreciated this yet, nor is IM embedded at all with the weak exception of the US.

iPhone announced

Blogged to death elsewhere (see Apple site and Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld, but these are the things that made it fascinating:

• Most impressive is the touch sensitive screen and its capabilities has been baked into the operating system - slick scrolling & appearance of QWERTY keypad when you need it for example.
  
• iPhone switches from portrait to landscape mode based on the way when you rotate the device. A proximity sensor detects when you put the phone to your ear, so that you don't 'press' any on-screen buttons.
  
• Zooming in on photographs & webpages
  
• Sync with iTunes - seamless - kinda as you'd expect: music, podcasts, contacts, calendar etc
  
• Auto switching between EDGE (ie mobile) and wi-fi. (3G to come)
  
• Conversations in SMS Messages - I like the way that the history of sent and received emails displayed together and not separate Sent and Received folders.
  

Apple have filed 200+ patents for their iPhone.
Available in June in US (using Cingular exclusively); Q4 in Europe. Asia next year.
Cost starts at $500.

SMS Volumes To Double by 2008 says Gartner

Worldwide SMS volumes will double by 2008, according to Gartner (nice summary here of the report).

Users in Asia will send the most messages, but North America will see the biggest compound annual growth rate between 2006 and 2010, as the medium embeds itself into the daily fabric of life, as it has done in the rest of the world. As a result, North America will become the second most important market globally.

The rest of the article emphasizes that Gartner hasn't seen anything that will push SMS off its perch in the mid-term.

Yahoo's Mixd - group text messaging

Yahoo provides us with Mixd - a group text messaging service.

Looks very similar to 3Jam (although it allows you to share photos from the phone - nice). See my previous comments on 3Jam. Do you really think consumers are going to be able to master all the commands?

Etribes in the UK has a much simpler and slicker solution.

Mobile Operators pin hopes on Mobile TV and HSDPA

Mike Grenville over at 160 Chars critiques Informa's 'Mobile Industry Outlook 2007' Report here. Informa concludes:

The industry thought that 3G would be the ARPU driver but now it is pinning its hopes on mobile TV and HSDPA.

Mike comments that there was no mention of SMS - still growing at 30% per year in the UK for example.

What about WAP or mobile internet? This I think is the undiscovered gem (or rather discredited years ago in WAP's case).

See stats indicating the penetration of internet browsing at Mobile Internet Access Grows (thanks to 160 chars again).