Enterprise Nation

A recent report from communications regulator, OFCOM, comes jam-packed with useful information on the technology habits of the nation. Thread through the information is the invisible hand of the home business owner at work.

OFCOM reports 

It’s a 365 page whack of a report and it’s complete with interesting facts and figures such as these:

• in 2007 we spent an average of 7 hours and 9 minutes a day using an array of communications services - up by 6 minutes from 2002. This includes watching television, surfing the net, using our mobiles, talking on a landline phone and listening to the radio.
• Time spent on PCs and lap-tops has grown fourfold between 2002 and 2007 - from 6 minutes to 24 minutes per person every day.
• Take-up of broadband through a landline grew from 52 per cent of households to 58 per cent in 12 months, mainly as a result of consumers upgrading from dial-up access to always-on broadband.
• There has been a surge in the take-up of mobile broadband devices with around 2 million adults in the UK saying that they had used a data card, USB modem or dongle to access the internet in March 2008.
• The driver of this has been the sale of dongles – small devices plugged into the USB port of laptops enabling internet access via a mobile network. Between February and June 2008, the number of dongle sales to consumers nearly doubled from 69,000 to 133,000 a month.
  (note from Ed – I was one of those figures and have twittered a great deal on how much I love my dongle! San has also written about them on the site here)
• Online advertising spend is up by almost 40 per cent year-on-year reaching £2.8 billion in 2007. For the first time, more money was spent on internet advertising than the combined advertising spending on ITV1, Channel 4, S4C and five (£2.4 billion).

This final one is great news for anyone with a website that's looking for advertising. It takes a while to attract the traffic that in turn attracts the advertisers but have heart, the figures here are greatly in your favour. – Emma Jones 

• Communication Nation: UK Consumers paying less but getting more