Ofcom research- More broadband, more digital, more mobile

[ Digital Age, More or Less:

* The following explores 2 recent Ofcom reports:

MORE:(1) Ofcom's "More broadband, more digital, more mobile" research finding (-Ofcom Communications Market report), which highlights broadband and digital convergence, the "accelerat(ion) into the digital age" for UK households, and the transformation of traditional industries- telecoms, radio, broadcasting.

Contrast this with the LESS findings in (2) b), Ofcom Focus Report on Wales (Ofcom Consumer Panel research report, Consumers and the Communications Market).

* followed by 3) recent wider exploration of trends towards digital being, in leading US pundits' commentary on the digital horizon and the embedding of the communications revolution in our everyday lives, with a macro business perspective on The Fifth Wave (Business2.0) and a micro personal connectedness perspective on Continuous Computing (Technology Review)].

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(1) Ofcom's second annual Communications Market Report

13|07|05 More broadband, more digital, more mobile - a common picture of accelerating take-up of new products and services

Ofcom today publishes research revealing changes in the communications sector as consumers and businesses adopt digital networks and formats with increasing enthusiasm.

In its second annual Communications Market report, Ofcom has identified a range of new trends in broadband, digital broadcasting and other communications services. These include:
More broadband

* For the first time, there are now more households with broadband than dial-up internet connections. 2005 was the year in which broadband became a genuinely mainstream consumer product, now present in almost 30% of all UK households and businesses and actively considered by many more.
* The number of new broadband connections per week has increased almost fifteen-fold in three years - from 5,500 per week in 2001 to 73,800 per week in 2004. This rapid acceleration in take-up has led to a (provisional) total of 8.1 million connections as of June 2005, more than double the number of connections at the end of 2003. B y the end of 2005, 99.6% of UK homes will be connected to a broadband-enabled exchange.
* A verage broadband connection speeds are also increasing. At the end of 2002, a 512kps connection typically cost £27 a month; as a result of greater competition between providers, a 1 Mbps connection now costs £20 a month.
* The combination of mass-market appeal, rapid growth, falling prices, increasing connection speeds and innovation in video technology means that by 2010, the number of households able to view television over broadband is likely to exceed the number of households dependent on analogue terrestrial broadcasts for all their television viewing.

More digital

* More than 60% of UK households now receive digital television; and every month more than 250,000 households - more than the number of households of a city the size of Sheffield - switch on to digital for the first time or add set-top boxes for additional televisions in the home. 70% of that growth in 2004 was driven by Freeview; by the end of 2004, almost 20% of households (4.6 million) received digital television via Freeview alone.
* In radio, 36% of adults with access to digital television have at some point listened to radio via their sets (up from 29% in 2003) and 19% of adults with internet connections have listened to radio online (up from 15% in 2003). DAB digital radio continues to expand. By the autumn of 2003, 250,000 DAB sets had been sold; by Q1 2005, that figure increased five-fold to 1.5 million.

More mobile

* Total revenues for the mobile telecoms industry now exceed those of fixed-line calls and access as consumer usage of mobile increases, encouraged by price reductions and the emergence of new services. Between 2000 and 2004, the total number of minutes spent making mobile calls in the UK almost doubled (from 34 billion minutes to 62 billion). During the same period, minutes spent making calls over traditional fixed-line networks fell by 6% (from 174 billion minutes to 164 billion). As a consequence, b etween 2003 and 2004, mobile telecoms revenues increased by 16% to £12.3 billion. Revenues from traditional fixed-line voice services fell by 6.2% to £10.5bn from £11.2bn in 2003.

(...)

Ofcom Senior Partner, Strategy and Market Developments Ed Richards said: “This report shows that UK households are now accelerating into the digital age. In parallel, industries formed over decades are being reshaped by digital broadcasting and broadband with every month that passes.”

The Communications Market 2005 report is available online at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/cm05/.

SOURCE: Ofcom website here

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(2) Compare (1) to Ofcom's recent consumer survey:

Consumers and the communications market: where we are now (Ofcom, April 2005).

a)The Ofcom Consumer Panel research report 'Consumers and the communications market: where we are now' along with key findings, plus focus documents on national and consumer segments.

This report details the findings from the market research project commissioned by the Consumer Panel into the current residential consumer and SME experience of the communications market. This will be an annual survey to assess changing consumer concerns year on year, and will be used by the Consumer Panel to inform its work in a number of areas.

The research focused on the residential consumer and SME experience of telecommunications (fixed and mobile), the internet (including broadband) and (for consumers only) broadcasting – including digital switchover – and use of technology.

The two key objectives for the research are to establish:

* What is the level of consumer knowledge regarding what is going on in the communications market and the choices/ alternatives they have now and will have in the future?

* What is the current consumer experience in the communications market?

+ Full report: here
+ Focus report on Wales: Ofcom Consumer Panel Research, Quantitative Research Findings, Focus on Wales (Saville Rositer-Base, April 2005): here


b) Excerpts from Focus report on Wales: Ofcom Consumer Panel Research, Quantitative Research Findings, Focus on Wales (Saville Rositer-Base, April 2005)

Summary of key findings for consumers in Wales compared to UK

Understanding
•Less likely to have heard of broadband, digital radio and 3G
•Awareness and understanding of digital switchover does not differ from the UK as a whole

Keeping informed
•Less likely to keep informed of developments in communications technologies at all

Ownership, use and satisfaction
•Less likely to have mobile phone or internet at home
•More likely to have digital TV
•Less likely to access the internet at all
•Less likely overall to have ever switched suppliers for their home communications services
•Less likely to be dissatisfied with their home communications services
•More likely to have any difficulties using a TV, but no real difference regarding other technologies

[ie the Focus Report on Wales highlights a digital deficit for Wales- which topic was aired in the recent Welsh Consumer Council conference session A Communications Agenda for Wales: see here]

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(3) Wider trends towards digital being...

[Ofcom's upbeat message of "more broadband/digital/mobile" and "acceleration into the digital age", finds an echo in the recent horizon scanning forays of two leading US pundits (both of which highlight wireless internet access)- with a macro business perspective on The Fifth Wave (Business2.0) and a micro personal connectedness perspective on Continuous Computing (Technology Review).]


a)
How to Ride the Fifth Wave
Business 2.0 | Michael V. Copeland, Om Malik | June 15, 2005

Cheap computing, infinite bandwidth, and open standards are powering an epic technological transformation that will churn up huge new opportunities -- and perils for those who can't adapt.

Rick Rashid makes his living staring off into the distance. He's head of Microsoft (MSFT) Research, the software giant's R&D arm, and it's his job to peer far over the horizon to divine where technology is headed. He ponders out-there issues like what each of us could do if there was enough computer storage to save every conversation we have from birth to death, or what happens when giant LCD panels become as cheap as today's whiteboards. Which makes it slightly incongruous that, at the moment, he's sitting in a Victorian-era hotel talking about steam engines.

The setting is San Diego's Hotel del Coronado, built in 1888, and Rashid is explaining how a blast from the past has given him a new notion of the future. On a recent vacation to London, Rashid visited Britain's Science Museum. He lingered before an exhibit of one of James Watt's earliest steam engines and others that followed in various sizes and configurations. It occurred to Rashid that in the 19th century, the answer for every engineering problem was a steam engine. If it was a big problem, it was solved with a big steam engine. Small problem? A small steam engine sufficed. Steam engines were everywhere. The technological muscle they provided sent Britain and ultimately the rest of the world chuffing into the industrial age.
Then it hit him: "I realized that we are coming into a stage now where our version of the steam engine is the microprocessor and software," Rashid says. "We are getting to a point where it is truly cheap and easy enough to put a combination of processors and software into anything, for any reason."

See article here

b)
July 07, 2005 | Computing's "Fifth Wave" | Posted by Wade Roush at July 7, 2005 05:46 PM in Continuous Computing.

In the July issue of Business 2.0, senior writers Michael Copeland and Om Malik argue that computing is entering its fifth wave, an "epic technological transformation" comparable to the introduction of mainframes in the 1960s, minicomputers in the 1970s, personal computers in the 1980s, and networking and the Internet in the 1990s. The three forces feeding this new wave, they say, are cheap, powerful computer hardware, especially mobile phones and handhelds; broadband Internet access from almost anywhere; and "technological openness," meaning the emergence of a "global tinkerer's workshop, where thousands of creative minds are constantly cobbling together code that entrepreneurs and even established businesses can cannibalize, free of charge, for parts to build new software systems."

Now, compare those three forces to the tagline of my Continuous Computing Blog: "Mobile Devices + Wireless Everywhere + Web 2.0 = A Social Revolution." On the first two elements, we're in exact agreement. And what Copeland and Malik call openness, I'm simply calling Web 2.0: a set of standardized, remixable tools for building sophisticated Web-based software services. When I talk about Web 2.0, I have the same examples in mind as those cited by Copeland and Malik (Amazon Web Services, Google's APIs, et cetera).

+ Read more here

+ See related article:

Wade Roush | Social Machines | 5 July 2005 | Reproduced from the print version of Technology Review's August 2005 issue
Continuous computing: the proliferation of cheap mobile gadgets, wireless Internet access for everyone, a new Web built for sharing and self-expression... suddenly, computing means connecting.
See here

[excerpts]

Continuous Computing
To grasp how rapidly things are changing, consider all the things you can do today that would have been difficult or impossible just a few years ago: you can query Google via text message from your phone, keep an online diary of the Web pages you visit, download podcasts to your iPod, label your photos or bookmarks with appropriate tags at Flickr or Delicious, store gigabytes of personal e-mail online, listen to the music on your home PC from any other computer connected to the Net, or find your house on an aerial photograph at Google Maps. Most of these applications are free—and the ones coming close behind them will be even more powerful. With more and more phones carrying Global Positioning System (GPS) chips, for example, it’s likely that companies will offer a cornucopia of new location-based information services; you’ll soon be able to find an online review instantly as you drive past a restaurant, or visit a landmark and download photos and comments left by others.
This explosion of new capabilities shouldn’t be mistaken for “feature creep,” the accretion of special functions that has made common programs such as Microsoft Word so mystifyingly complex. There is something different about the latest tools. They are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and fundamentally social, built to enable new kinds of interactions among people. Blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and Web surfing from a smart phone are just the earliest examples. Almost below our mental radar, these technologies are ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous computing—continuous in the usual sense of “uninterrupted,” but also in the sense that it’s continuous with our lives, in all their messy, social, biographical richness.

(...)

Computing Is Real Life
It’s clear that new technologies are making computing continuous—meaning both “always on” and “smoothly shading into our real lives.” But what’s actually new about the experience of continuous computing? How is life changing for those with the money to buy a few mobile devices and the time to sign up for Web-based social services?
At bottom, the shift is bringing computing far closer to our everyday experience. We’ve just seen how social software can give us new ways to tap into the collective wisdom of the people in our social groups. But that’s only one consequence of continuous computing. On a more personal level, for example, the portable devices that sustain the information field are more respectful of our bodies and our perambulatory nature. No longer do we have to slouch over desktop computers all day to stay connected to the Net: computing devices have become so small, light, and ergonomic that we can take them almost everywhere. Visit any airport, beach, or city park and you'll see people carrying laptops, cell phones, and dedicated devices such as cameras and music players as naturally as if they were part of their clothing. For people who must take their cell phones absolutely everywhere, there are even "ruggedized" devices like Motorola's new i355 handset, which meets U.S. military specifications for resistance to dust and blowing rain.
Mobility, in turn, has created a demand for software that's sensitive to our ever-changing locations. Already, many cell phones sold in the United States contain systems such as GPS receivers that report users’ whereabouts during 911 calls. So far, few carriers have created ways for third-party software developers to put this location information to other uses, but in time, navigation tools and automatic-access location-specific shopping or dining information will become standard fare for cellular subscribers. In this area, Japanese and South Korean companies are, as usual, showing the way. Tokyo-based cellular provider KDDI, for example, sells phones that use GPS and onscreen maps to guide urban pedestrians to their destinations.
(...)
And this, in the end, is what’s truly new about continuous computing. As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We’ve used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that’s changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent “on the computer” no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn’t: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on—even though they’re the only things making the world clear.