May 2008

Ofcom has just released its third ‘Nations & Regions Communications Market’ report — and interestingly, following my last post on getting rid of landlines, it highlights an emerging trend:

In the UK’s biggest cities, such as Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester, an ever-larger segment of the population is living without the use of fixed-line telephony. Across the UK as a whole, 87% of homes have a fixed-line telephone (down three percentage points from last year). The 12% of homes which rely on mobile phones only are able, increasingly, to access broadband through wireless technology.

The report is divided into sections for each of the home nations, plus a UK-wide summary (PDF):

• 30% of adults have used the internet to watch video content
• TV viewing is highest in Scotland and the North East of England
• Wales has the highest level of radio listening
• Consumers in urban areas are increasingly reliant on mobile telephony
• Broadband take-up in rural areas has caught up with urban areas
• Non-ownership of services is due to perceived cost and lack of interest

You can view the summary and regional reports on the Ofcom site, or take a look at some of the other coverage from around the web:

• UK Snapshot: Broadband Take-Up Highest In Countryside, 30 Percent Watch Video
  paidContent:UK
• Fears of digital divide are groundless
  The Guardian

Update: more on the decline of landlines in the UK

Inspired by Dan’s post, I’ve been giving this some thought recently. While my initial thought was ‘yes’ there are a number of obstacles which I’d need to overcome in order to ‘cut the cord’:

Broadband internet

At home, I have an ADSL connection, which uses BT’s OpenReach phone line infrastructure. In order to use ADSL, you have to pay line rental for the phone line — and as a result, you get a landline phone. In order to eliminate the landline from the mix altogether, I’d have to switch to a cable internet provider.

Verdict: doable

Landline phone number

I don’t actually use the landline number provided as part of the telephone package — instead, I have a Skype online number.

In the office, however, we have a variety of landline numbers. Moving these to Skype isn’t possible at the moment, unfortunately, though setting up our own VoIP system might be.

Verdict: doable, but trickier

Calling

For UK calls, I use my mobile. For international calls, I use Skype. Simple.

Verdict: no change here

Of course, there are some other issues. Emergency calling is one — though it seems to crop up a lot more in discussions in the US than it does in the UK. I suspect people in the UK are much more comfortable using mobiles for 999 calls than our Stateside cousins.

Dan’s post on the subject addresses some of these in more detail, and Dean Bubley’s post has some interesting stats:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, shared-adult homes (eg students living in the same household) are very high on the wireless-only scale, compared with families. Similarly (and probably overlapping) renters are more wireless-centric than homeowners. And there is also a preponderance of low-income and ethnic members of this category.

There’s also frequent discussion of landline dependency on the Skype 3.X public chat hosted by our friends over at Skype Journal.

As Ryan mentioned on the Mac blog yesterday, an improved version of Skype 2.7 for Mac is now available for download — it includes a number of improvements which are detailed in great, um, detail on the Garage blog.

Two highlights:

• Better support for NAT-PMP an UPnP — this means that Skype will cooperate better with your router if it's being troublesome
• Support for authenticated proxies — bonus for those of you on university connections which require password authentication to connect to the internet

Download the update now to benefit from these improvements, plus a host of bug fixes.

A report issued by AdMob (via Om), which serves adverts to mobile websites, notes that the 3 Skypephone is now the number 5 mobile internet device in the UK.

It’s a new entrant in their top twenty ranking of handsets, and made up 2.7% of all ad requests in March 2008 — the top handset’s share was 6.6% by way of comparison.

Of course, this isn’t entirely surprising — 3’s keenly priced unlimited data package (minimum £5 top-up per month on pay as you go) means that the 3 Skypephone is a good deal for those who want to talk and surf on the move.

You can see and download the full report below:

Starting yesterday, Rebecca Campbell began a 33 day non stop journey around the world to raise money for Motivation, a UK based charity for people with mobility disabilities.

She’ll be visiting a number of countries around the world, and will only be allowed to sleep while on the move, whether on a plane, boat or sleeper train.

You can track her progress on her blog, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr — or chat to her on Skype: her Skype name is theskypenomad.