SimonWaldman.net

For sponsoring the first month of The Cloud’s wifi coverage of the City. Frankly this should just be free…but there you go. Still, I can finally get wi-fi coverage while sitting in Smiths. Progress..of a sort.

Following hot on the heels of the online ad figures, comes the latest broadband stats from Ofcom - and the headline is that more than half of UK adults live in households with a broadband connection.

Some other bits of interest from the full report (.pdf here)

* 51% of adults with broadband had accessed online video clips, 26% doing it weekly.

* The rate of growth is (unsurprisingly slowing down) - there were 3.2m net additions in 2006 vs 3.8m in 2005.

* BT with 24% market share, took 29% of net additions in 2006 despite the ‘free broadband’ frenzy.

* The top 10% of users download almost twice as much content per month as the other 90% put together (40.7GB vs 21.2GB)

* (Only) one in five consumers take broadband as part of a bundle.

* People are switching - 27% of residential internet users in Q3 had said they had switched, with 11% saying they had switched in the last year.

And on the wireless internet

* 31% of adults have internet enabled phones, half of them use them go to online.

* Only 6% of adults have a data card, only 5% a mobile enabled PDA.

* Most common internet activity on a mobile phone is ‘news, weather, sports headlines’

And on Wi-fi

* By Sept 2006, there were 12,000 commercial public hotspots - a 32% y-o-y increase

* Over 60% of commercial hotspots are in cafes, bars or restaurants

* Only 34% of adults who own a wi-fi enabled laptop use a wi-fi hotspot