Australia goes mobile – 47% of net connections via mobile devices

It’s long been reported that the majority of internet connections in Japan are via mobile devices – since 2006 in fact.

It now seems Australia is on the verge of following the same path, with the ABS reporting that as at 31 December 2011, 47% of internet connections in Australia were via mobile devices.

The report, (8153.0 – Internet Activity, Australia, Dec 2011), has some other interesting findings as well…

• The number of internet connections grew by 11.0% in the year to 31 December, and by 6.3% since the end of June 2011.
• Mobile wireless grew fastest, with a 14.7% increase since the end of June 2011.
• The number of dial-up connections continued to decline, to 475,000 – still a substantial number, but representing only 4% of the total 11,596,000 internet connections in Australia. Of those 379,000 (3.2%) were households, the rest businesses.
• The number of dial-up connections declined 17.9% (from 579,000 to 475,000) since June 2011.
  Note the ABS state the decline was 16.7% – I don’t know why our calculated figures differ.

• More Australians remain on connection speeds less than 8Mbps (55%), however a good proportion are on 8-24Mbps (34.3%). Only 0.3% are on connections greater than 100Mbps.

• The total data downloaded was 345,518 Terabytes (or 345,518,000 Gigiabytes) for the three months ending 31 December 2011. This was an increase of 26% since June 2011 (remember the number of connections only grew by 6.3% so we’re all downloading more).
• The average downloaded per connection was 29.8 Gigabytes (Gb) for the three months so, on average, we download 10Gb per month.
• However dial-up users only downloaded, on average, 67 Megabytes (Mb) of data per month, while broadband users downloaded an average of 10.3 Gb of data – showing a massive difference in usage.