74 million mobile connections in the UK. 60 million people.

I’ve been meaning to do a post about this news released by Ofcom a few weeks ago.

Here are the highlights:

• By the end of 2007, there were almost 74 million mobile connections serving a population of 60 million in the UK. This was an increase of 3.7 million connections since the end of 2006. The total number of mobile connections increased by 48 per cent in the five years from 2002.
• Seven out of ten people with a mobile phone and a landline use their mobile to make calls, even when they are at home. One in ten people with a landline at home said that they never use it to make calls.
• We are a nation of texters. In the UK, nearly 60 billion text messages were sent in 2007 – an increase of 36 per cent since 2006 and up by 234 per cent since 2002 when we sent 17 billion texts. The average mobile phone user sent 67 texts per month from each mobile compared to 53 texts per month in 2006.
• The majority of children have access to the internet and most have a mobile phone but they use them in different ways. Boys aged 8-11are twice as likely to use the internet every day than girls of the same age (45 per cent compared to 22 per cent). Meanwhile girls aged 12 -15 are more likely to use a mobile phone than boys of the same age (74 per cent compared to 65 per cent).
• Instant messaging is more popular than email amongst children with 62 per cent of 12-15 year old sending an instant message, compared with 43 per cent of them sending an email. Adults prefer to email – 80 per cent of adults sent an email compared to 34 per cent who used instant messaging.

It’s nice to have some actual figures rather than telling folk ‘there are more mobiles than people in the UK’.

So there you have it.

74 million ‘connections’.  60 million people.