Study shows UK and USA consumers are ready for mobile internet – but operators aren’t

Here’s an interesting survey result from mobile content experts Volantis. Over 4,000 UK and USA respondents took part in the study – and Volantis found that a huge number of them would make much more use of mobile internet features if their data plans were more generous.

What are the details?

Volantis commisioned YouGov to run the survey. It ran on-line, and was responded to by 4,324 USA and UK consumers over the age of 18. The collected data has been released as the Mobile Internet Attitudes Report 2010.

Ok, what did they find?

Here’s a summary of the interesting results.

• 13% of UK and 17% of USA adults said they access the internet from their mobile phone more than once a day.
• 51% said that they would stop searching after three minutes if they couldn’t find something on the mobile web.
• 33% of UK and 25% of USA adults said they don’t use the internet despite having access on their phone – with 32% UK /  23% USA saying that slow network speed are the biggest barrier to using the mobile web more regularly.
• In both regions, only 5% said they were satisfied with their mobile internet service – and 32% said they would use the mobile web more often if there were more mobile-optimised sites.

What we think?

This is going to continue being a problem for a while. It’s a sad fact that consumers really are READY for mobile internet. They wantto use, they are ready to use it. Unfortunately, the operators simply can’t handle that amount of usage yet. The infrastructure isn’t robust enough at the moment. We could talk about limitless data plans and the like, but most operators just aren’t in a postition to do that even they wanted to. Give it a few years, maybe the rollout of LTE and other 4G technologies will ease the burden.

But for now we’ll just have to put up with what we’ve got.