Mobile figures show UK's digits still tapping out SMS

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 7 Apr 2003 at 11:07

Oftel has released its latest figures for the UK's mobile market, revealing a boost in subscribers and the unstoppable march of SMS messages topping 1.5bn a month.

The figures, covering the last three months of 2002, make good reading for the mobile industry, which has only just started to see the market energised after several years of stagnation.

The 1.5bn text messages we're sending each month represents more than one message per subscriber every day, with a grand total of 4,683 million for the quarter. That's an increase of almost 36 per cent year on year. Quite how much of this is made up of picture message is unclear and somewhat academic, as most picture messaging services were either free or heavily subsidised during the period.

This is also evident from the fact that average retail revenues per subscriber have remained relatively static for the period with an average of £49.6 for the quarter, compared with £49.8 for that preceding quarter. Vodafone topped the range at £66.4 and T-Mobile brought up the rear with £37.6, although again these figures showed little change over the preceding quarter.

However, we are talking more, with each mobile user now making 90 minutes of voice calls a month.

What will really excite the mobile operators though, is that there are now more mobile users. New phones, services and Christmas brought in 1.5 million new subscribers, with the figure at the end of the quarter standing at just under 50 million. This is the largest quarterly rise for almost two years. In particular, O2 and T-Mobile revealed larger subscribers increases than the giants Vodafone and Orange.