Angus Kidman29 April 2008, 12:00 PM
There are officially more phones than people in Australia, but what are we all doing with the spares -- and why are ADSL subscriber numbers actually falling?
According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority Communications Report 2006-2007, there were 21.26 million mobile phone services in operation as at June 30, 2007. The Australian population as of this week is above 21,2185,000, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So it seems safe to assume that a good proportion of us have more than one mobile, especially when you allow that despite the much-discussed youth obsession with technology, most 18 month olds don't have much use for a mobile.
So what are we using the extra services for? Data might be one answer. Almost a quarter of those phones are now 3G, with 4.5 million 3G services active, up 192% on the previous year. Of course, that still means that three-quarters of us are sticking with GSM or CDMA, although the latter is no longer an option with the CDMA network officially being killed off.
In any case, it seems that despite the prevalence of cheap plans, mobile data is still in its infancy. According to ABS figures quoted in the report, only 5% of broadband users are on wireless broadband, so we'll have to speculate on other possibilities. Are people keeping a spare prepaid Vodafone SIM in case everything goes to pot with Telstra? Are they secretly buying new services to do drug deals (another case of everything going to pot) or conduct adulterous affairs? Are we all still stupidly signing up to 24 month phone deals?
Unsurprisingly, given that saturation coverage, the number of fixed line services and payphones (remember them?) dropped during the year. VOIP is booming though, with 2.89 million new numbers assigned to VOIP providers. Those accounted for the vast majority of the 3.23 million new geographic phone numbers allocated in 2006-2007. Despite that, only 6% of us are actively using the technology. No wonder getting a new number is so cheap.
Something else that's gotten a lot cheaper is broadband, especially on cable, where costs per gigabyte fell by 49.6% during the year. ADSL fell by 17.7%. And despite the impression that everybody in Victoria is more than willing to download Underbelly, the average ADSL subscriber downloaded less than 30 gigabytes in 2006-2007. Obviously, no-one's doing much patching.
Other weird figures: Of Australia's 6.43 million Internet accounts, 2.09 million are still on dial-up. How have they not gone crazy yet? And while .com.au domain registrations have grown to 795,638, that still means only just over one in ten subscribers have their own domain name. We hope that means everyone is registering cheaper .com domains rather than relying on ISP email, but we suspect we'd be wrong.