South Africa has registered a growth in demand for mobile data from consumers following the growth in popularity of smartphones
Tim Walter, executive head of strategy and business transformation at Nashua Mobile, said, “The trend will continue to rise as devices such as the Apple iPhone 5 penetrate the market.
“The amount of data call number records Nashua Mobile processes has almost doubled year on year, reflecting a significant growth in data usage by the company’s mobile subscribers," Walter added.
“Many players in the mobile industry have seen data revenues grow by 20 per cent each year, even though the cost they bill per megabyte is falling all the time.”
According to the Nashua Mobile the reasons that data usage has taken off so strongly include the number of consumers switching from cellphones and feature phones to smartphones as well as the fact that the devices were becoming more bandwidth hungry all the time.
A statistics from the company revealed that around 80 per cent of the new devices Nashua Mobile was selling were smartphones.
Walter explained, “Phones like Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy SIII and many Nokia Lumia models with high-resolution touchscreens eat data at a rapid rate. Many of them are now set to download email attachments by default. Since the browsing experience on these devices is so enjoyable, users are spending more time on the Web and social networks on their smartphones than they did before.”
He added that the situation has led to telecommunications industry being under pressure to deliver convenient data options that allow users to squeeze more data from their phones at an affordable cost since consumers who do not track their data spending end up burning through their data bundles quickly.
