Ofcom Report: Nearly half of UK owns a smartphone

According to the new Ofcom Communications Market Report, 40% of Britons now own a smartphone, while tablet ownership in the UK has increased from 2% to 11% over the past year.

In addition to this, the same number (two fifths of the population) said that their phones were the most important device for accessing the internet.

Keeping with the online world, internet advertising spend constituted the largest of all categories in 2011, raking in £4.8 billion, compared to £4.2 billion for TV advertising and £3.9 billion for press.

There was similarly good news for radio – industry revenues grew at a rate of 3.5% year-on-year to a total of £1.2 billion last year.

Meanwhile, TV industry revenues continued to grow by 4.9% year-on-year in 2011, to £12.3 billion. This increase came about courtesy of an 8.3% rise in subscriptions and 2.1% advertising growth.

There wasn’t such positive news for telecoms, however, as total UK revenue suffered a dip of 1.9%, caused by a fall in wholesale revenues, to £39.7 billion.

Other key findings include:

Digital

• Eight out of 10 people in the UK had access to the internet in the first quarter of 2012
• Average time online per month, per internet user stood at 23.5 hours in 2011
• Two thirds of internet users have accessed Facebook
• Social networking sites are increasingly being used to navigate online. Facebook generates almost a quarter of all referred traffic to YouTube (23.7%), compared to 32.3% from Google

Mobile

• The average Briton now sends 50 texts per week
• The average cost of making a mobile voice call fell to broadly the same level as a fixed line call in 2011
• For the first time, over half (52%) of all call volumes were made from a mobile phone
• 17 per cent of UK households intend to buy a tablet within the next year
• The total number of fixed broadband connections passed 20 million for the first time in 2011, with over five million mobile broadband connections
• The overall amount of time spent talking on the phone fell by 5% in 2011

Radio

• UK radio listeners listened to an average of 22.5 hours of radio each week, up by 24 minutes on 2010
• Listening to the radio on digital devices increased to 29.2% of total listening, with DAB accounting for two thirds of this amount
• More than four in 10 UK adults own a DAB radio set – a 4.4% year-on-year increase
• BBC Radio 4 Extra was the most popular digital-only station, reaching 1.5 million listeners in the first quarter of 2012

Television

• Viewers watched an average of four hours of TV per day in 2011, up from 3.7 hours in 2004.
• Over a third (37%) of UK adults with a home internet connection watch online catch-up TV.
• Around 5% of UK households now own an internet connected smart TV
• More than one third (35%) of TVs sold in the UK in the first quarter of 2012 were either super-large (33 to 42 inches) or jumbo sized (43 inches and over). This compares with just 1% of TVs of these sizes that were sold in 2001.

Download the full Ofcom Communications Market Report here.