Ofcom reveals all in communications trends

AMONG THE GEMS revealed in Ofcom’s latest report on communications are that product bundling benefits UK consumers, traditional industry revenues are under pressure, the Irish spend most time on their mobiles, the Poles prefer the radio and more women use the internet than men.

Ofcom’s third International Communications Market Report looks into the £876 billion global communications market.

One of the main findings in the report was that the UK has more households with digital TV – in fact 86 percent of us watch digital TV, up nine percent.

High Definition (HD) service take-up doubled during 2007 to around nine million subscribers across the seven larger countries surveyed – the UK leads Europe with 700,000 HD households.

Since the launch of services such as the all out addictive Sky+ and similar services UK viewers have had their experiences revolutionised as now they can pause, record and rewind live TV – in the UK 30 percent of us now own a DVR.

Additional price comparison research was also considered in this report which found that UK consumers continue to get a good deal when it comes to buying communications devices. There are two reasons for this – competitive markets driving down prices and bundling deals.

Mobile growth was also proving to be pretty high with a total of 74 million subscriptions in the UK.

The number of calls made from mobile phones also increased in 2007. In the UK, we spent 136 minutes per month talking on our mobiles, 23 minutes longer than in 2006.

Mobile broadband is also far more popular than it used to be as UK dongle sales reached 163,000 in July 2008.

Although we have concentrated on the changes to UK communications, the report also found that more women use the internet in the countries surveyed, and while the Poles listen to the radio more, Canadians are the social networkers of the world.

Despite these findings, the main point Ofcom wants to highlight is that the UK is leading internationally as a digitally advanced nation. µ