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The Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) today (April 13) published for the first time the statistics of local mobile data usage, which sees a surge to 147 Terabytes (i.e. 147,000 Gigabytes) as of January 2009, or an average amount of 44 Mbytes per 2.5G/3G mobile user for that particular month. This represents four times and 14 times the mobile data usage over the same period in 2008 and 2007 respectively.
A spokesman for OFTA said, "We are pleased to see the remarkable growth of mobile data usage, which indicates that members of the public are increasingly used to deploying the mobile service for transmission and reception of mobile data. This is consistent with the trend observed in other advanced economies and demonstrates that Hong Kong has matured as a leading wireless city in the region."
"We are truly appreciative of the investment that the mobile network operators have been putting in our infrastructures such that mobile services of higher speed and better quality are continually provided to the community. The strong growth of mobile data usage is also attributable to the offer of competitive service packages by mobile network operators and the increasing popularity of a variety of smart phones available in the market," the spokesman said.
"With the growing importance of mobile broadband service for people in Hong Kong, OFTA has released the monthly mobile data statistics for public consumption with a view to further promoting the service.
"Apart from mobile data usage, the number of 2.5G/3G mobile phone users has increased by 15% on a year-on-year basis reaching 3.35 million in January 2009. The total number of mobile phone users is 11.43 million and this represents a penetration rate of more than 163%," he said.
The monthly wireless service statistics, including mobile data usage, the number of short messages sent and received and the number of mobile phone users, can be downloaded from OFTA's website: http://www.ofta.gov.hk/en/datastat/eng_wireless.pdf .
Ends/Monday, April 13, 2009
Issued at HKT 11:00
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