The United States is at the forefront of a mobile web growth, with a three fold increase in usage over the last year, according to new research from Bango.
Bango says that this rapid rise, which has taken the US to second position behind the UK, is being fuelled by the increasing popularity of mobile search as a way of finding new content and services.
The top five countries accessing the mobile web via Bango in April 2007 were the UK at 27%, the US at 21%, South Africa at 11%, India at 9% and Indonesia at 3%. In total, Bango detects mobile web users from over 190 countries.
In addition to growth in the US, Bango’s data shows that 9% of all accesses to mobile websites now come from India, up from 4% a year ago. India, with a population of just over 1.1 billion and lack of an established fixed phone line network, relies on mobile phones to stay in touch. Here, mobile phone usage is set to exceed European levels within the next few years.
Anil Malhotra, SVP of Marketing at Bango, said: “We see that wherever flat-rate mobile data charges are pervasive in a country then there’s much more web browsing.
“This is certainly true of the US and South Africa and the imminent introduction of flat-rate data charges in the UK will push up mobile web usage in the UK even further.”
Research from Telephia and comScore on mobile v PC-based internet usage published in May revealed that 5.7 million people in the UK used a mobile device to go online during January 2007 compared to the 30 million people age 15 or older who accessed the web from a PC (see 5.7 Million Use Mobile Internet In January In UK).
Meanwhile, a report from Media-Screen said that just 5% of US broadband users (approximately five million) use the mobile internet (see 5% Of US Broadband Users Use Mobile Internet).
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