Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released is latest update of broadband statistics. Surprisingly they show that Australians downloaded less data in the quarter to June 2008 than six months earlier.
Total downloads by the 37 ISPs with more than 10,000 active subscribers was 554,340 gigabytes compared to 562,930 gigabytes for the December quarter.
This is pretty surprising given everything we have been told about surging traffic volumes on the Internet, thanks to services like YouTube and the {often illegal} peer-to-peer sharing of large video files.
It's also pretty surprising in comparison to volumes just six months earlier: in the quarter to 31 March 2007, Australians downloaded 'only' 420,790 Gbytes.
The ABS could offer no definitive explanation as to how a 50 percent growth in nine months could stall so spectacularly, only a suggestion: that traffic flows are very seasonal and depend heavily on popular sporting events. "It will interesting to see what effect the Beijing Olympics have on the next quarter's figures," an ABS spokesman said.
The ABS figures are compiled based on data supplied by the ISPs and the latest figures are likely to have been inflated somewhat by a change in methodology.
The ABS now restricts its data gathering to, currently, 37 ISPs with more than 10,000 subscribers, but for the December quarter included all ISPs. For comparison purposes it has removed those smaller ISPs from the numbers. However the customers of any that have been absorbed by larger players will have been omitted from the December quarters' figures but included in the latest figures.
The other big surprise from the latest report was the increase in wireless broadband. Subscriptions have risen almost 90 percent in six months. Wireless accounted for 14 percent (809,000) of all Australian broadband subscriptions at the end of June 2008, up from 433,000 in the December quarter 2007.
As at June 2008, Australia had a total of 7.2 million active Internet subscribers; just under 80 percent of them broadband connections. Aside from the growth of wireless the biggest shift in the six months to 30 June was to higher speeds.
}During the period dial up numbers dropped from 1.721 million to 1.566 million and DSL grew from 3.702 million to 3.936m. The ABS spokesman suggested the slow decline of dial-up was an indication that "most people who want broadband can now get it and the rest are stuck with dial-up."
The total number of broadband services at speeds above 256k rose from 5.025m to 5.547m but the biggest increase by percentage was from below 1.5Mbps to higher speeds Those on services from 1.5Mbps to 8Mbps rose almost 50 percent in the period, from 1.014m to 1.444. The number on ADSL2+ services, 8Mbps to 24Mbps, rose from 1.283m to 1.390m in the quarter.
Subscribers with download connections of 1.5Mbps or greater increased to 3.1 million or 43 percent of all subscribers compared to 2.5 million (36 percent at the end of December 2007. There were 6.2 million household subscribers and 1.0 million business and government subscribers at the end of June.
David Bass
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