Mobile data use in Hong Kong increases 14 fold in 2 years

On average, every mobile user with a web-connected phone in Honk Kong used 44 megabytes of data in January. That’s a total of 147,000 Gigabytes in one month. The Office of the Telecommunications Authority of Hong Kong (OFTA) released these numbers yesterday, which show an increase in mobile data usage of 14 times over January 2007.

The actual number of 2.5G/3G mobile phone users has increased by 15 percent per year in the same period.

From the story:

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 deploy 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. 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.”

What we think?

There’s a huge discrepancy between the increase in the number of web-connected phones and the amount of data usage in that 2 year period. The number of phones increased by a little over 30% - the amount of data increased by 1,400% The guys from OFTA are really pleased with that - it claims that with fast connections and generous flat-rate data plans, Hong Kong is the perfect example of a mobile city.