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Chapter 1: The Global Mobile Market Mobile Technology in Travel - The Introduction
Clearly in all the major Western markets the dominant split is between personal or family
contracts and pre-paid/pay-as-you-go arrangements.
al Mobile Mark
Interestingly, the proportion of users on personal and family contracts is not nearly as
different for smartphone users as might be expected. It would seem that in today’s market
Glob
a far larger proportion of users are on personal or family contracts than historically,
regardless of whether they own a smartphone. The main differences would appear to be
geographical; for example the US is the strong leader in personal or family contracts with
over 80% of overall users subscribed to this type of plan, at least partly reflective of the
market here. This is reflective of the fact that the vast majority of contracts tie you and
your handset to that operator.
Excluding Italy, the only two countries with any major difference in personal and family
contracts for smartphone users are the UK, where it is rather pronounced, and less so in
Germany, suggesting that in these countries data usage is still prohibitive in a pre-paid
setting.
The contract split is more pronounced when one adds in the contracts paid for by
employers. As expected many more smartphone users fall into this category than overall,
due mainly to the more corporate smartphones such as the Blackberry.
Bucking the contract trend at the extreme end of pre-paid category are the “mobile mad”
Italians, with by far the lowest proportion of contract mobile phone users both overall
and in smartphones. This is indicative of laws in Italy which result in most mobile phones
being sold “unlocked” meaning that there is less of a need for Italians to commit to one
carrier.
Figure 1.29: Percentage of users that have a form of data plan (3 months average
ending November 2008)
UK US Germany Italy Spain
30%
29.8%
26.4%
25%
21.7%
20%
15.3%
15%
12.9%
10.9%
10.4%
10%
9.9% 9.7%
9.2%
8.3%
6.2%
5%
4.2%
3.8%
4.3%
3.3%
2.5%
3.2%
2.2%
2.6%
2.4%
1.7% 1.7%
2.1%
1.4%
1.6% 1.6%1.5%
0.9%
1.4%
0%
Text Photo Data Data Unkown Other
messages messages limited unlimited
Source: M:Metrics
32 33
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