The number of smartphones continues to grow, there are already in the world almost as many mobile phones -6.800 million- as people -7.100 million-. The report, edited by Fundación Telefónica, has revealed to us one more year the current mega trends, the future trends that are beginning to be present and the Cayman-Islands Mobile Database most representative indicators of the behavior of users in their digital life. According to the report, 2013 has been characterized by the unstoppable advance of the demand for ICT services in a difficult macroeconomic context. This consolidation of digital life in Spain shows that 71.6 percent of citizens, two points more than in 2012, had accessed the Internet in the last three months. In absolute terms, 24.8 million Spaniards between the ages of 16 and 74 connect to the Internet, 700,000 more users than a year earlier.
But the fact is that the use of the Internet is not only spreading but is becoming more and more intensive. Thus, 18.6 million people access the Internet every day, 53.8 percent of the population between 16 and 74 years old. Young people between 16 and 24 years old are the most intensive, since 86% connect daily, and 97.4% do so at least once every three months.
64.1 percent of internet users in the last three months participated in general social networks (Facebook, Twitter or Tuenti) by creating a user profile or sending messages. This percentage increases to 94.5 percent among young people between 16 and 24 years old. By sex, the participation of women (65.6 percent) is somewhat higher than that of men (62.8 percent).
The connection to the network is made more and more outside the habitual residence or the workplace. This is stated by 69.9 percent of internet users. The most used device to access the Internet on the go is the telephone, with 63.2 percent, followed by laptops (including netbooks and tablets), with 31.6 and the rest (PDAs, game consoles, etc. ) with 6.3 percent. The number of smartphones continues to grow and there are already in the world almost as many mobile phones -6.800 million- as people -7.100 million-.
But if 2013 has been the year of consolidation of the leadership of smartphones as the preferred terminal for Internet users, the great novelty has been the strong emergence of tablets, whose worldwide sales already exceed those of laptops. And the number of connected TVs is also growing exponentially: 24% of Internet users already connect television to the Internet, 33% more than in 2012.
Related to devices, the consumption of applications does not stop growing either. At the end of 2012, more than 1,200 million people used mobile applications and this figure is expected to grow by almost 30%, which would put that in 2017 it would reach 4,400 million users.
The preference for mobility has driven the penetration of mobile broadband (BAM) to 60.4 lines per 100 inhabitants. The connection in mobility, increasingly used, makes mobile broadband the engine of the advancement of the Information Society and adds 9.5 million new users in the last year. In total, there are already 26 million mobiles in Spain that have Internet. This implies that BAM’s penetration has practically doubled in two years, making it the fastest growing telecommunications service.
As for fixed broadband, the type of connection that has grown the most has been fiber optics, which already exceeds half a million lines and has grown by nearly 90% in one year. The evolution in fiber coverage, deployed mainly by Telefónica and which reached 3.5 million homes at the end of 2013, makes it possible for FTTH networks to account for 89% of new accesses to new generation networks, which makes to this technology in which it increases the most in its implementation.
Users consolidate the trend of evolving towards a model based on downloading content at the moment that they want to consume more than possessing them. The type of connection most used in Spanish homes is the xDSL line, with 7.05 million lines, which represents 75.6 percent of total accesses, followed by cable, with 1.9 million accesses and 20 , 1 percent of all residential accesses.
The implementation of LTE technology is the response of telecommunications companies to the greater number of Internet users, the Brother Cell Phone List more intensive use of the Internet in mobility and the better benefits of the terminals that allow heavy content consumption such as video. Given that this increase in demand occurs in a context of economic weakness, especially in Europe, it has forced operators to share infrastructures to be more efficient. Europe is the only region in the world where billing for telecommunications services is decreasing. It is worth as a fact that the average expenditure of a mobile phone user in the United States is almost double that in Europe. As the report highlighted in the last edition, electronic commerce climbs positions within the activities that users carry out on the Internet.
