Mobile Internet Growth

Mobile Internet Growth is the growth of the Internet when accessed via a mobile phone.

Mobile phone connections are increasing more rapidly than purchases of any other consumer product, see Tomi Ahonen's article about this [Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users [http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/01/putting_27_bill.html] ] . Since this article was published there were a number of announcements stating that half the world now had mobile phones [Reuters article Nov 2007 [http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=media&storyID=nL29172095] ] . These articles are slightly misleading because the real story is that the number of phones has reached half the population of the world. In reality many people have more than one connected phone. For example in Italy the phone penetration is 133%. See [ Morgan Stanley report [http://www.sherpalo.com/resources/InternetTrends031808.pdf] ] .

The Mobile Internet data connections are following the growth of Mobile Phone connections albeit at a lower rate. In 2008 the Morgan Stanley report showed that phones with data connections were less than 20% of the total number of phones. However, this is still a large number of phones.

Many users in Europe and the US are already users of the fixed internet when they first try the same experience on a mobile phone. Meanwhile in other parts of the world such as India their first usage of the Internet is on a mobile phone. Growth is fastest in parts of the world where the PC is not the first user experience of the Internet. India, South Africa, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are seeing the fastest growth in Mobile Internet usage. To a great extent this is due to the rapid adoption mobile phones themselves. For example, the Morgan Stanley report states that the highest mobile phone adoption growth in 2006 was Parkistan and India.

AMD the semiconductor manufacturer are trying to create a vision that by 2015 half the world will have an Internet connection ( [50by15 site which predicts 50% world connected on the Internet by 2015 [http://www.50by15.com] ] ). Much of their initiative centres round the introduction of cheap PCs to the developing world, but the reality is much of the internet usage growth they predict will come from Mobile phones.

Sites which reference Mobile Internet Growth

* Phone Count - this site predicts that by 2012 there will be as many connected mobile phones as there are people in the world : [Shows Real-time how many phone there are now and predicts 100% connected phones by 2012 [http://www.phonecount.com] ]
* 50x15 (50% of the world connected using the Internet (Fixed and Mobile Internet) by 2015)
* Internet Trends- Morgan Stanley

References