Mobile Benchmarking 2008

I am always searching for mobile data and find it difficult to get a relatively up to date snap shot. So here is my contribution to those seeking this info.

In North America 91% of house holds held by Generation Y'ers have a cell phone.
RIM and Windows Mobile are part of the top companies I wrote about in my previous posting .
These guys and IPhone make up the heaviest used OS's in the market today.

Just a couple of high level stats I want to point out:

· Four out of five households have a cell phone, and most have more than one. Cell phone
penetration hit 80% of households in 2008 — and a whopping 91% of Gen Y homes. The average
North American household has 1.7 mobile phones today; among households with at least one phone,
the mean number is 2.1 — fueled by cheap family plans. These low-cost shared plans mean that there
are 2.4 phones on average in Younger Boomer households with a phone, but homes led by Gen Xers
are those least likely to make do with just one phone.

· High-end phone owners are the heaviest mobile Internet users. Apple’s promise of the Internet
in your hand apparently resonated with those who bought an iPhone — across all phone brands,
they are the most likely to use the Internet on their phone and the most frequent users. But they’re not alone: Palm and RIM owners are nearly as likely to browse on their phones. While these three brands represent a paltry 4% of the overall market, they represent four times as large a share of mobile Internet users.

· The operator market continues to consolidate. Whether in the US or Canada, the largest operators dominate the market. North of the border, the top three carriers — Rogers, Bell Mobility, and TELUS — hold at least 83% of the subscribers.1 In the US, at least 78% of subscribers get their service from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile — and that number will tick up five percentage points should Verizon’s announced acquisition of Alltel pass regulatory muster.

· Data use is accelerating, especially among Gen Yers. Mobile phones are clearly no longer about
just voice. Half of all subscribers now use text messaging, more than a third use picture messaging, and more than one in six access the Internet on their phone. Gen Yers are not only more likely to use data applications on their phone than the overall population, they’re more likely to do so with greater frequency. For example, while only 5% of all mobile phone owners download or stream music to their phone every month, the corresponding number is more than twice as high — 12% — among Gen Yers.



Stewart Severino
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