Good news for the NBN: mobiles' share of Internet downloads still minimal

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 13 December 2011 08:44

IT Industry - Market

Australians now on average each have 1.5 mobile services, but despite there being almost five million dedicated mobile broadband devices in use and almost 10 million mobile handsets used to access the Internet, 93 percent of Internet downloads still take place over fixed networks.

The figures come from the ACMA's statutory Communications Report 2010-2011 tabled in Parliament yesterday by communications minister, senator Stephen Conroy.

Opponents of the NBN maintain that its commercial viability will be eroded by the increasing popularity and capability of mobile broadband services. NBN Co, and many of its supporters, argue that mobile networks will never be able to supply the bandwidth and capacity to meet future demands.

The ACMA's report says: "While mobile Internet use is increasing, fixed-line networks continue to do the heavy lifting of the digital economy, carrying an estimated 93 percent of total data downloaded via the Internet."

It reports that, in the year to 30 June, the total volume of data downloaded from the Internet across fixed and mobile networks was up 76 percent on the previous year, to 274,202 terabytes and the average data downloaded per user increased 56 percent from 16.1Gbytes the June quarter of 2010 to 25.1Gbytes in the June quarter of 2011.

It's likely that Internet TV was a significant contributor the increase in data downloads. The ACMA reported that: "During June 2011, nearly 1.1 million Australians accessed catch up television viewing services online compared to 568,000 during June 2010." The report offered no information on the consumption of other Internet TV services, nor on data volumes associated with catch-up TV.

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During 2010-11, mobile wireless broadband services increased by 39 percent to reach 4.79 million services at June 2011 while mobile phone Internet services increased by 43 percent to reach 9.68 million services at June 2011. The number of mobile handset services also increased by nine percent to 24.49 million services at June 2011. In contrast the number of ADSL services increased over the year by only seven percent, to 4.9 million.

One of the biggest increases during the year was the use of VoIP services from mobile phones - the ACMA reported a 226 percent increase from a modest base of 274,000 at June 2010. Overall the number of VoIP users grew from 2.9m at June 2010 to 3.8m at June 2011. During the year another 400,000 Australians abandoned fixed line phone services altogether, taking the total of fixed-line free households to 2.7 million.

For the second year running the ACMA has complemented the statutory report with others focusing on digital economy. There are individual reports on the emerging e-commerce market, converging communication channels and the evolving mobile handset services market.

The first report 'E-commerce marketplace in Australia: Online shopping,' was released on 16 November, the second 'Converging communications channels: Preferences and behaviours of Australian communications users' on 8 December. The third report 'The emerging mobile telecommunications service market in Australia' is yet to be released.