MuniWireless

A survey conducted by mobile community Itsmy.com revealed that almost 12% of the itsmy.com members are still in bed when they check their personal messages for the first time during the day. The company asked 15,000 members and found out that:

• the average user visits an astonishing 160 mobile internet pages per day
• heavy users log in up to 10 times a day with an online time of up to 2.5 hours to write and check their mails and personal messages, find out where their friends are and what they are doing or upload latest pictures and videos to their personal mobile site
• 99% of all respondents have personal content on their mobile phones. This fast growing worldwide phenomenon is valid for smart phone owners, like the ones with Nokia N95 and iPhones, as well as for people with low-priced starter models.

What all of them really want: reasonably priced flat rates, higher speed of network and faster phones with longer battery lives. Then, more than 90% would increase their usage of mobile internet. Even the current economic situation wouldn’t get between them and their phones: only 1/3 of all respondents tend to reduce their mobile internet time to save money.

Young Europeans are still on prepaid plans

There’s no doubt that more people are accessing email and web pages on mobile devices ever since the iPhone came out. The largest percentage of data use occurs on the iPhone, not on Nokia or other manufacturers’ devices, and I think most of the iPhone users are in the US.

I question just how many young European mobile phone users (the ones who are on these mobile social networks) have data plans. In Italy, over 80% of mobile phone users are on prepaid. The most recent surveys conducted by Ofcom, the UK regulator, show that on the average, 50% of Europeans have prepaid voice plans (and of that 50%, the vast majority are under the age of 30, exactly the heaviest users of social networks).

The high cost of mobile data service, including outrageous roaming fees, has become the hottest issue in the EU’s telecoms regulatory body. The EU has managed to lower the cost of text messages sent and received while traveling abroad, and it is now trying to lower data roaming as well.

Until these rates drop dramatically and mobile operators offer truly affordable flat-fee data plans, people are going to stay on their prepaid voice plans. I expect that in these tough economic times, more people will move from their current postpaid and data plans to prepaid.