Broadband growth coming from mobile customers

Around 71% of UK homes now have broadband internet access, up from 68% last year, but nearly all of the growth is coming from mobile broadband services.The Communications Market Report (CMR) for 2010 from communications industry watchdog Ofcom shows that new customers for fixed line broadband services are proving harder to come by. This year's 3% growth in total broadband uptake compares to growth of 10% in 2009. The proportion of homes with fixed line broadband access remained static at 65%. Just 2% of household are still connecting to the internet via dial up modems.The good news is that the potential speed of access is going up, with the average broadband speed in 2009 (the latest period for which figures are available) has risen to 9.4 megabytes per second (Mbps) from 6.9Mbps in 2008.Unfortunately, that measurement is based on advertised maximum speeds, and in practice the real life speeds achieved by users are much lower than the "up to" speed figures featured prominently in internet service providers' advertising.Just 0.2% of UK households have the capability of enjoying speeds in excess of 24 Mbps, well below the level enjoyed by most countries in the developed world, though penetration will improve as both BT and Virgin Mobile extend their super-fast broadband coverage.As for what the average Briton is using his or her internet access for, a surprisingly large amount is for peer to peer file sharing (30% of the total) while the success of the BBC iPlayer, YouTube and other video streaming sites has seen online video content also rise to account for a large chunk of all consumer internet traffic. Some 31% of households with internet access used it to watch online catch-up TV, an increase of 8 percentage points on the previous year.The proportion of time-shifted television viewing has more than tripled since 2006, from 1.7% 5.9%, the report noted. Bog standard browser based surfing accounts for just 15% of consumer internet traffic, Ofcom's figures show.Around 76% of UK households now have a PC or laptop but browsing on the hoof is becoming increasingly prevalent, with 23% of mobile handset owners using their phones to access data-related services such as the internet, up from 20% in 2009. Though at times it seems that everyone in the world is on Facebook or some other social networking site, the OfCom report indicates that social networking uptake among internet-enabled users is 40%, though that is up from 30% the year before and 20% the year before that.