'Mobile internet' the way forward
2009-12-17 08:47
More and more sports fans in South Africa are using 3G connections and their cell phones to access the internet for up-to-date, and on-the-go, sports news and results.
Sport24, the sports website with the largest South African audience, ran an informative online survey in October – touching on the basics (age, sex and ethnicity), the realities (quotas in sport) and the fun stuff (why sports fans prefer John Smit to Lee-Anne Liebenberg) in South African sport; with over 7,000 readers taking part.
Other topics touched on were the ways and means of accessing online news, with Sport24 users clearly big fans of the ‘mobile internet’ at the moment. And who can blame them; it’s more flexible, there are no fixed line costs and some of the line speeds on HSPDA are pretty damn special!
ADSL remains the most popular way of readers accessing the internet at home, with 30.12% operating that way, but 3G and HSDPA are closing the gap – fast – with 28.15% of the survey participants making use of the ‘mobile internet’. Interestingly, 15.39% of internet users rely on their mobile phones – even when at home.
In all, 62.30% of the survey’s participants say they access the internet via their cell phones – for news on-the-go – whilst just fewer than 20% of the readers admitted to not making use of the internet facilities on their phones. (Almost 75% of those cell phone users – as one would expect – have contracts, with 25.02% making use of prepaid services.)
Sport24 Publisher Andrew ‘Tank’ Lanning finds his readers’ online trends very interesting, saying: “The trend toward accessing sport content on your cell phone talks to the fact that we live in a ‘Now’ generation – people want information at their fingertips, which a mobile phone quite literally does for you, and it’s also why we’ve done so much work on our WAP site and iPhone application (at Sport24).”
And commenting on the rise of 3G as people’s chosen means of connection, Lanning continued: “The fact that people are using 3G as their point of access at home, or just their actual cell phones, talks to the high prices and perhaps general ineptness of our fixed line providers in South Africa! It’s an international anomaly and an indictment on our country actually.”
Nokia phones were by far the most popular handsets (with more than half the participants in the survey making use of the Finnish-designed handsets), with ‘smart phones’ – iPhone, Blackberry and HTC – making up just over 10% of Sport24 users’ armoury.
As far as social networking trends are concerned, facebook remains the most popular way of following news, but – amazingly – nearly 38% of the survey participants had no idea what social networking is, with 5% not knowing what blogs are either.
Keep visiting www.sport24.com this week to find out more about the survey which has everyone talking – from internet trends, to quotas in sports, to metrosexual males and their love for Springbok captain John Smit.
‘Mobile internet’ the way forward
More and more sports fans in South Africa are using 3G connections and their cell phones to access the internet for up-to-date, and on-the-go, sports news and results.
Sport24, the sports website with the largest South African audience, ran an informative online survey in October – touching on the basics (age, sex and ethnicity), the realities (quotas in sport) and the fun stuff (why sports fans prefer John Smit to Lee-Anne Liebenberg) in South African sport; with over 7,000 readers taking part.
Other topics touched on were the ways and means of accessing online news, with Sport24 users clearly big fans of the ‘mobile internet’ at the moment. And who can blame them; it’s more flexible, there are no fixed line costs and some of the line speeds on HSPDA are pretty damn special!
ADSL remains the most popular way of readers accessing the internet at home, with 30.12% operating that way, but 3G and HSDPA are closing the gap – fast – with 28.15% of the survey participants making use of the ‘mobile internet’. Interestingly, 15.39% of internet users rely on their mobile phones – even when at home.
In all, 62.30% of the survey’s participants say they access the internet via their cell phones – for news on-the-go – whilst just fewer than 20% of the readers admitted to not making use of the internet facilities on their phones. (Almost 75% of those cell phone users – as one would expect – have contracts, with 25.02% making use of prepaid services.)
Sport24 Publisher Andrew ‘Tank’ Lanning finds his readers’ online trends very interesting, saying: “The trend toward accessing sport content on your cell phone talks to the fact that we live in a ‘Now’ generation – people want information at their fingertips, which a mobile phone quite literally does for you, and it’s also why we’ve done so much work on our WAP site and iPhone application (at Sport24).”
And commenting on the rise of 3G as people’s chosen means of connection, Lanning continued: “The fact that people are using 3G as their point of access at home, or just their actual cell phones, talks to the high prices and perhaps general ineptness of our fixed line providers in South Africa! It’s an international anomaly and an indictment on our country actually.”
Nokia phones were by far the most popular handsets (with more than half the participants in the survey making use of the Finnish-designed handsets), with ‘smart phones’ – iPhone, Blackberry and HTC – making up just over 10% of Sport24 users’ armoury.
As far as social networking trends are concerned, facebook remains the most popular way of following news, but – amazingly – nearly 38% of the survey participants had no idea what social networking is, with 5% not knowing what blogs are either.
Keep visiting www.sport24.com this week to find out more about the survey which has everyone talking – from internet trends, to quotas in sports, to metrosexual males and their love for Springbok captain John Smit.
