Millions use cellphone Internet, new study shows

Arthur Goldstuck

The use of mobile Internet services in SA has “exploded”, though less than half of urban cellphone users who have Internet-capable phones use the Internet, according to new research from World Wide Worx.

A new reseach report, released on Thursday, shows that use of specific applications such as MXit and Facebook Mobile far outpace browsing on the phone, even though both are available on almost two-thirds of the phones used by SA’s urban cellular users.

Though 28% of the urban cellular market is using mobile instant messaging (IM), as many as 65% have the capacity on their phones, meaning that only 4,5m of 10,5m potential mobile IM users actually use it.

In many cases, an application has been installed on the phone, and the owner may even have registered to use the service, but is not in fact a user.

And, while 60% of users in this market have phones that can browse the Internet, only 21% report that they use this form of mobile Internet access.

World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck says it is “quite startling” how many people have these features on their phones but don’t use them, either out of ignorance or because of cost concerns.

The findings suggest, on the surface, that more than half of urban cellular users, or 8,5m people, are capable of accessing e-mail on their phones, and as many as 60%, or 9,5m, are able to browse on their phones.

The implications of these numbers are significant: in one fell swoop, they would turn the SA Internet user base from the 5,3m reported by World Wide Worx at the end of 2009 to 9,6m. Add IM to the mix and the total comes 10,5m — double that of the Internet user base at the end of last year.

The World Wide Worx study was conducted face to face among urban cellphone users aged 16 and older. — Staff reporter, TechCentral

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http://mralan.blogspot.com Alan Levin

Nice article, very interesting thanks. A couple of days ago at the INET conference an expert speculated that most people who use the Internet (in some way) on their smartphone are already internet users (ie it’s a secondary means of access). Are there any findings about this, for example is there a correlation between those that do use data on their phones, and those that use it as a secondary means of access.
http://www.rickjoubert.com Rick Joubert

Ref Alan Levin’s comment / I would agree that the overwhelming majority of Smartphone web access is for secondary access, i.e. most of those consumers have easy access to the PC Web and they use their Smartphones for web access on the run or based on convenience drivers. However that is not at all the case with Tier 1 access as defined by myself and Arthur Goldstuck – Tier 1 (the so caled “WAP Internet”) has approximately 11 million unique cellphone users and only around 30% of these have access to a PC Web connection – the mobile phone is therefore the primary internet access channel in the mid LSM “mass market” and very much a secondary access channel in the higher LSM (Tier 3- i.e. access to the “real web” on a smartphone)smartphone space. The majority of low to mid LSM consumers in SA today will have their first experience of the internet on a mobile phone. Rick Joubert

Millions use cellphone Internet, new study shows

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