Our love affair with surfing the internet in airport lounges and coffee shops continues apace.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data released yesterday reveal mobile wireless subscriber numbers are skyrocketing, up 51 per cent between December last year and June this year.
The ABS figures show mobile subscriptions climbed from 1.3million to 1.96 million in that six-month period, giving mobile wireless 27 per cent of the broadband market compared with 20 per cent in December.
Mobile wireless allows consumers access to the internet from wherever the service provider has network coverage.
Wireless is an innovative complementary technology, but industry experts agree its popularity does not reduce the need for fibre broadband investment to support Australia’s future requirements.
The government believes the public will want both wireless and fixed broadband in future. People will seek out a wireless service for convenience while travelling, but at home they will still want a fixed broadband service that offers faster connection speeds.
Mobile broadband should ideally be seen as complementary, or an extension, to fixed networks.
Overall the ABS data showed Australia had 8.4 million active internet subscribers as at the end of June.
While the number of dial-up subscribers continued to fall, down from 1.56 million in June last year to 1.1 million in June this year, the faster types of connection increased from 5.6 million to 7.3 million over the same period.
In the past six months, virtually all the increase in subscriptions was attributable to mobile wireless. And even this may be understating the take-up, because mobile wireless connections to the internet via mobile telephones are excluded from the ABS calculations.
Users were also keen to upgrade their services to faster download speeds, with 57per cent of subscribers using a download speed of 1.5Mbps or greater in June, compared with 51per cent just six months earlier.
