Pink Connect Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Mobile’

The team at Pink Connect are delighted to welcome Tom Knowles as Mobile Manager

Tom joins us with considerable experience of Blackberry® Enterprise and Vodafone services.

Tom can be contacted on tom@pinkconnect.com

Original article from BBC Newsbeat

People on mobile phone contracts are wasting £800 million every year because they are on the wrong tariff.

New research from price comparison site Top10.com claims that if people switched to contracts that suited them better they could save £62 a year.

It’s being put down to users either not making the most of their monthly deals in terms of calls, texts and data downloading or going over their minutes and being charged extra.

There are also claims that with so many deals, on different length contracts, people can often get confused and end up not sure which one would work best for them.

To avoid paying more than you need the advice is to check old bills before signing on to any new tariff, especially as many contracts now last up to two years.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT TMCNET.COM

Mobile substitution has been a factor in landline voice losses for years.

So service providers are watching for signs of similar behavior in the broadband access market as well. Six percent of U.K. consumers rely completely on a mobile broadband connection, while eight percent of U.K. households use both fixed and mobile broadband access services, according to Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator.

The percentage of U.K. consumer broadband customers relying completely on mobile, instead of fixed connections, is nowhere near as high as in Austria, where there are more mobile broadband users than fixed users.

Not surprisingly, then, 41 percent of those using mobile broadband consider it to be their main method of Internet connection at home. About 43 percent of mobile broadband users said they have only a mobile broadband connection, so that finding would be expected.

As with broadband in general, mobile broadband is most popular among adults ages 15 to 34 and its use is driven by more affluent demographic groups. Looking just at the 15-to 34-age segment, about 10 percent of users rely solely on mobile broadband.

The mobility trend is more pronounced for voice services, though. Penetration of all communications services, except fixed-line, has increased since 2008, with homes now more likely to have a mobile than a fixed line for voice services.

About 89 percent of homes use mobile phones while fixed line penetration is 87 percent. Personal use of mobile phone remains highest among consumers ages 15 to 44, said Ofcom.

The percentage of adults who live in a household with access to a mobile phone but no landline has increased steadily between 2005 and 2009, from eight percent to 13 percent, driven by the lower socio-economic and low-income groups, Ofcom said.

Bundled services seem to be reducing churn levels and also reducing consumer spend on communications services, Ofcom also noted. Switching levels have remained broadly stable across all communications services, except for buyers of bundled services. Over the past 12 months bundled service customer churn has declined from 24 percent to 13 percent.

The majority of the purchased bundles were either made of a mix of fixed voice and broadband (44 percent) or a mix of fixed voice, broadband and multi-channel TV triple play (34 percent).

The most significant increase has occurred in the take-up of triple play bundles, Ofcom says. The popularity of the triple play offer appears to have largely been a consequence of consumers switching from dial-up broadband and choosing to use either their current or a new multi-channel TV provider for landline, broadband and TV.

As dial-up customers are the most-likely targets for new broadband access sales, so dial-up customers upgrading to broadband also are driving new sales of bundled packages as well.

Consumer spending on communications actually fell in 2008, though, from £68.84 per month in 2007 down to £65.01 in 2008. The five-percent drop largely is attributable to consumer savings from bundles, but also partly is a result of declining voice landline use and lower calling charges for landlines in service, says Ofcom. Mobile calling is taking up the slack, but mobile costs also have been declining steadily since 20004, Ofcom notes.

Spending on mobile services fell by nearly six percent during 2008, despite a six-percent increase in the average number of voice calls per mobile connection. The average price spent per minute on mobile is falling as more voice minutes and SMS messages were included within customer buckets.

Household spending on Internet and broadband services also fell for the second consecutive year in 2008, by six percent. Bundles are the reason, Ofcom said.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT TMCNET.COM