The report is disfigured by the usual bureaucratic gush - "the evident enthusiasm with which Australians are engaging in the digital economy", "digital convergence is well and truly with us" - but is a valuable source of official statistics about connectivity. Lots of activity counts, of course, and not much evaluation of what people are doing when the digits are dancing to and fro ... a consequence of ACMA's sources and the way that it conceptualises its corporate mission. (After a night interpreting Commonwealth and state evidence statutes my brain's relying on cliches such as 'corporate mission').
Put aside the flummery that indicates -
During 2008-09, Australians continued to adopt new communication and media services and adapt their usage patterns to meet their specific lifestyle needs. Services such as 3G, VoIP and wireless broadband internet are being increasingly used, with factors such as lifestyle, age and family type shaping these choices. Australians increasingly seek flexibility in where and how they access communications and content.Instead, graze some of the figures. ACMA indicates that the number of mobile phone services reached 24.22 million last year, up by 9.5%. There were 2.1 million wireless broadband services as of 30 June 2009, up 162% on the preceding year.
As with other advanced economies - one former colleague rang up, of course on the mobile, to sing 'die POTS, die' - the number of fixed-line phone services again declined, down by 3% to 10.67 million. All major carriers reported mobile network revenue exceeding revenue from the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). There were 12.28 million 3G mobile services as of June 2009, up from 8.55 million in June 2008.
Normalisation of the internet - now as yawn-worthy as having a mobile and more popular than owning a cat (if the rather problematical stats about moggy ownership are to be believed) - is evident in continuing growth in subscriptions, with a reported 8.4 million internet subscribers in Australia at June 2009. That is up from 7.2 million at June 2008. Around 80% of Australians have an internet service at home. Most of those services are "broadband enabled"; broadband subscribers have risen 6.72 million. Wireless broadband subscribers accounted for 25% of all internet subscribers at June 2009, up from 11% at June 2008.
ACMA aggregates numbers from ISPs in reporting that during the 2009 June quarter Australians downloaded 99,993 terabits of data, up from 55,434 terabits. Not all of that was clips of Lady Gaga or Michael Jackson. The population supposedly "viewed 46.6 billion web pages from home", up from 38.9 billion in 2008.
It's not quite time to abandon 'dinosaur media' and commerce. ACMA claims that "online data and information services" generated revenue of $1.37 billion during 2008-09. Online advertising expenditure reached $1.7 billion by the end of 2008.
