Dongle wonga
Mobile phone operator Orange has published its fifth Digital Media Index, which looks at consumption of digital media. The most striking stat to come out of it was a 4,125 percent increase in data usage through mobile dongles, which are mainly used on notebooks.
Even allowing for Orange's vested interest this points to an explosion in the mobile broadband market and the channel business opportunities associated with it.
As you would expect from this figure, subscriptions to these mobile broadband dongles increased by over 500 percent. Additionally, mobile handset data usage doubled.
"The Orange Digital Media Index shows that the ‘mobile data era' has truly arrived," said Paul Jevons, director of products, portals and services for Orange. "An explosion in the number of mobile applications and new embedded laptops will boost mobile data demand even further in the coming months."
Orange reckons one of the reasons behind this is increasing demand for mobile entertainment services and social networking, but things like music downloads and unique users to social networking sites only increase by double figure percentages.
What's more likely is simply that mobile broadband has become cheaper and more reliable. As Jevons said - with notebooks increasingly coming with 3G connectivity built in, this trend is likely to continue.
