Mobile broadband and broadband bundles see more uptake
The UK telecom regulator, Ofcom released its Communications Market Report for the first quarter of this year. According to the report, the uptake of broadband bundles has gone up by nearly two hundred percent while the average budget that the UK households spend for the internet & broadband related services has declined from £9.87 to £9.45 during 2006-7.
It should be noted that Point topic, the broadband research has also reported the growing popularity of broadband bundles which are becoming cheaper option for the broadband customers when compared with stand-alone broadband deals. Confirming this fact, Ofcom’s latest report shows that the subscriptions to broadband bundles have grown up to 32% by March 2008 as against 18% in 2006.
Among the broadband types, fixed line broadband connections make up more than half of the total broadband connections (54%). ADSL broadband connections that are accessed via landlines have grown by 6 percent during the last one year.
Switching broadband providers has been on rise during the last twelve months. Around one-third (27%) of the broadband customers in the UK have switched their ISP at least once during the quarter ended in March, 2008.
As for the broadband speeds, the maximum speeds that the broadband providers advertised for their products were around 5.9Mbps on average in the last quarter, which was significantly higher than the advertised (3.6Mbps) speeds a couple of years ago. Although there was discontent with the speeds attainable by the broadband customers, the over-all customer satisfaction did not decline much thanks to the improved services offered by the ISPs in recent times.
While high speed broadband products are gaining more popularity in recent times, the mobile broadband is another product that has become huge success as it offers convenience to the customers to access the internet on the move. Many mobile broadband providers now offer free dongle with their packages while some mobile broadband packages come with free laptop offer such as the mobile broadband packages offered by T-mobile and 3 mobile broadband provider.
By the end of June, 2008, the monthly sales figure of USB modems (dongles) has exceeded 133,000 as against 69,000 dongles a month in February, 2008. Currently, there are more than 2 million mobile broadband connections in the UK out of which one-fourths of the customers (511,000) were added during the last five months.
Similarly, the 3G mobile phone users who use their handsets to access the internet have also increased significantly during the last twelve months. Currently, there are over 12.5 million 3G mobile broadband users thanks to the net addition of 4.7 million connections made during the last year.
IPTV services have also shown great growth as 17 percent of the broadband users are now watching on-demand videos and TV programmes on the internet. This means the IPTV services like BT Vision and BBC iPlayer have doubled the viewer-ship during the last year. Now, the major IPTV broadcaster, BBC iPlayer offers over 700,000 videos/day online to its subscribers. Online videos have also become hugely popular as the leading online video player, Youtube is now being watched by more than 9 million customers.
