Britain leads the way in affordable broadband

Broadband? Afford-band, more like. People in Britain are embracing digital technology faster than any other nation, according to a new report by communications regulator Ofcom.

Of the twelve industrialised nations studied for the report, Britain offers the cheapest broadband, mobile and pay-TV rates, and is also ahead of most when it comes to broadband take-up at 60%.

Social networking is also on the up, with half the UK using websites such as Facebook, Bebo and Myspace, and 43% of the population regularly uploading photos of friends and family to the internet. The keenest social networkers were Canadians, at 55% of the population. In the USA, the birthplace of Facebook, 40% of internet users were signed up to social networking site, whilst in France the figure was as low as 27%.

Eight percent of total music sales in Britain are now made online, the highest figure of any European country with the exception of Spain. Given the healthy state of the music industry in this country, this ought to come as no surprise, although Britain lags behind the US, where almost a quarter of music sales are made digitally. Nearly a fifth of advertising revenue in Britain is generated online.

The report found that on average Britons spent 839 minutes per week online, compared with 913 in the USA, 573 in Germany and 449 in Spain.

Peter Philips, partner for strategy and market developments at Ofcom, said: “Right now it’s hard to prove the case for cannibalisation from traditional broadcast media to the internet. But what we can say is that broadcast-based advertising media haven’t been benefiting from the overall growth in the market.”

One of the reasons given for Americans’ strong dependence on computers in comparison to their European counterparts was the prevalence of the mobile phone this side of the pond.

“One of the things that is becoming clear is that for a lot of reasons British people, especially those under the age of say 40, have got used to using their mobile phones for communication, whereas in the US they are used to using their computer and in Japan they still use their phone in a different way,” said Professor Simeon Yates, director of the Culture, Communication and Computing Research Institute at Sheffield Hallam University.

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