Since 2006, U.S. mobile users have been paying dramatically lower prices, and therefore talking more, than users in Western Europe and Japan, the latest Federal Communications Commission data indicates.And though there may be other areas where work must be done, access, usage and price no longer are problems. Nearly 90 percent of potential users have access to four or more different providers. Some 95.5 percent have access to at least three providers. Fully 99 percent of people have access to at least two different providers. And 99.8 percent of potential users have access to at least one provider. That includes people living in rural areas where service is more limited.
Approximately 99.3 percent of the U.S. population living in rural counties have one or more different operators offering mobile telephone service in the census. Nearly 57 percent of the population lives in areas with at least five competing operators.
On average U.S. mobile subscribers paid about seven cents per minute for mobile voice calls in December 2006 based on an estimate of average revenue per minute. Prices declined 85 percent from 47 cents in December 1994 to seven cents in December 2005.
In Western Europe revenue per minute averaged 20 cents in the last quarter of 2006, while in Japan users paid an average of 26 cents a minute.
U.S. mobile subscribers lead the world in average voice usage by a wide margin, with Western European subscribers averaging 150 minutes and Japanese subscribers averaging 145 minutes, compared to an average of over 700 minutes in the U.S. market.
Lower prices also have other effects of concern to wired service providers. If wireless use does not cost too much more than tethered calling, lots of users will simply abandon use of wirelines in their lives as consumers.
During the second half of 2006, 11.8 percent of U.S. adults lived in households with only wireless phones, up from 7.8 percent in the second half of 2005, and triple the percentage (3.5 percent) in the second half of 2003.
About one in four adults aged 18 to 24 years lived in households with only
wireless telephones, and nearly 30 percent of adults aged 25-29 years lived in wireless-only households.
1 comment:
In every country you mention but the U.S., only outbound minutes truly matter, since you only pay for outbound minutes. In the U.S., you pay for both.
I'm not saying we don't use more voice minutes--everyone I see is more inclined to call someone versus send a text--I just don't think it tells the whole story.
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