Social media dominates mobile broadband activity

Social media and social gaming dominate mobile broadband usage according to new traffic statistics released by mobile operator Three.

Facebook is the most popular service used by customers accessing the web via mobile broadband on their computer or tablet, according to the amount of data customers use when browsing to those websites.

More surprisingly, social gaming site Zynga.com and its top game, Farmville, also feature amongst the top five sites used on Three’s mobile broadband service. Meanwhile, visits to Google.com only generate a quarter of the volume of browsing data traffic compared to Facebook.

With nearly 2,500 terabytes (2,500,000 GB) of data flowing over the Three mobile broadband network in June 2010 alone, the browsing figures are based on a massive volume of mobile broadband data usage information. The figures differ significantly from those just measuring site visits via fixed line Internet usage, which see Google UK in first place and do not feature social gaming sites at all (Hitwise, 2010).

Outside of social media, Apple.com features strongly coming in as the third most popular site, driven by access to iTunes and from iPad users.

Three’s mobile broadband network was recently named best in the UK by the regular YouGov Dongle Tracker survey 2010 – an accolade Three has now scooped twice in a row. Three has the largest share of the UK mobile broadband market - at around 35% - and has been the market-leader since launching the country’s first high-speed mobile data service in September 2007.

Charlotte Blanchard, Three’s Director of Internet Services and Products, said: “We’d expect to see a difference in usage patterns between fixed and mobile Internet access, but the dominance of social gaming shown in these browsing figures is particularly surprising. It shows that, for many, keeping up to date with friends or regular gameplay on the move is now more important than accessing their emails via Hotmail or keeping up to date with the news.

“The volumes of data we’re looking at show the importance of Mobile Broadband as an internet access channel – with nearly seven terabytes of Facebook browsing data being generated in just one week – and that doesn’t count the up and download volume.”