77% of Australians not into 3G

Link: Australian IT – Market shunning 3G – survey (Chris Jenkins, SEPTEMBER 28, 2006).

AUSTRALIA’S increasingly grey-powered mobile market continues to shun 3G, with two thirds of people saying they don’t need it, a new survey has found.

The survey of more than 6000 people, conducted by research group Nielsen, found the number of mobile users in Australia increased by 234,000 in the three months to June.

More than half of the new customers were aged over 55, with a quarter of the new additions over 65. But older users tended to stick to basic services, using their phone for voice calls only, Nielsen associate director Jody Loughlin said.

Thanks to Dafyd at Global Switch for spotting this one. That’s a bit of a challenge, isn’t it — if half your new customers are over 55, sticking a (subsidised?) new all singing all dancing handset in their hand, when all they want is phone call capabilities, might not be the best use of resource.

Potentially more concerning is the statistic that 2/3 of the 6,000 users questionned appear to be ‘shunning 3g’.

However, on the other hand, if you asked my mother: Do you use ‘3g’, she’d say no.

However she does send picture messages and texts, as well as call.

She doesn’t really know what it means to ‘use 3g’.

I don’t think I do either.

If asked the question, I’d definitely say yes. I reckon I ‘use 3g’ for sending pictures and videos from my phone. Rarely use video calling.

But I’m actually quite clueless as to what 3g means in the context of using it. I called a few mobile industry people this morning to ask their perspective. Each of our definitions for ‘using 3g’ was TOTALLY different!

It’s yet another exampe of a stupidly marketed worldwide industry who brought us such illuminating services as ‘MMS’ (WHAT THE?), GPRS and so on.