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No. 7 Mobile usage by age

Do you have a mobile phone for your own personal use and do use it to view WAP pages or communicate via SMS? (EU-15)


Do you have a mobile phone for your own personal use and do use it to view WAP pages or communicate via SMS? (NAS-10)

Base: Mobile phone owners, weighted column percentages
Questions: A19, A23, A26, A27 (NAS: A19, A27)
Sources: SIBIS GPS 2002, SIBIS GPS-NAS 2003

Breaking down mobile usage patterns by age groups shows that EU-15 respondents under 25 are the most active SMS users. In addition, they access the Internet through their mobile phones to a larger degree than other age groups, though this figure still remains below 10%. It is not surprising that the majority of young mobile owners are also mobile data users, whether using only SMS, or both SMS and Internet data services. In other age groups there is a higher number of mobile users who only use voice calls and not mobile data (i.e. neither SMS nor mobile Internet). Also, a large proportion of respondents over 50 do not own a mobile phone for personal use. Hence, age plays a crucial role in the definition of mobile Internet user profiles. In the candidate countries, mobile phone penetration among the young is considerably higher than among citizens aged 50 and more, too, though overall penetration rates remain much below the EU-15 average.

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