Texting more popular than phone calls in the UK
“The average UK consumer now sends 50 texts per week – which has more than doubled in four years – with over 150 billion text messages sent in 2011,” said Ofcom, an independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, in its Communications Market Report for 2012, published on July 18. “Almost another ninety minutes per week is spent accessing social networking sites and e-mail, or using a mobile to access the internet, while for the first time ever fewer phone calls are being made on both fixed and mobile phones.”
The trend is most prevalent among young people in the UK, who are increasingly using social networks, text messages and email despite indicating that they prefer face-to-face communication.
Almost all of the 16-24-year-olds (96 percent) sent text-based messages to their friends and family on a daily basis using a text-based application and close to three out of four (73 percent) use social networking sites.
Comparatively, only 63 percent of young people say they talk face to face with their friends every day and less than seven out of ten (67 percent) use their mobile phone to make calls on a daily basis.
Over the past few years, internet connectivity has become ubiquitous and the smartphone has seen large gains in popularity in the UK; two trends that are greatly affecting the way young people communicate with each other.
“The report shows that traditional forms of communications are declining in popularity, with the overall time spent on the phone falling by 5% in 2011. This reflects a 10% fall in the volume of calls from landlines, and for the first time ever, a fall in the volume of mobile calls (by just over 1%) in 2011,” said Ofcom.
The average household in the UK owns three different internet-connected devices but as many as 15 percent of households have six or more.
Smartphone ownership is reaching new highs in the country. Close to two out of five (39 percent) adults owned a smartphone in 2011, up 12 percentage points from 2010. According to recent figures from Nielsen, smartphone ownership among mobile owners in the US hit 54.9 percent as of June 2012 while in the last three months, two out of three buyers in the country who purchased a mobile phone opted for a smartphone.
Ofcom’s UK communication fast facts:
81.6 million mobile subscriptions in the UK
7.6Mbit/s is the average actual broadband speed
50 percent of adults use social networking sites
5 percent of UK households own an internet connected ‘smart TV
92 percent of adults personally own/use a mobile phone
11 percent of homes own a tablet
10 percent of UK adults now have an e-reader.
