Mobile is the lynch pin of the communications sector, driving its growth and accounting for 53 percent of total telecoms revenues, according to the UK regulator Ofcom in their exhaustive study of the £870 billion (US$1,776 billion) global communications market. Its second annual International Communications Market Report, which covers 2006, also found that the use of mobile phones is quickly outpacing the use of landlines across Europe, the US, and Japan. In the twelve countries surveyed—the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada, Japan, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland—mobile connections dominated. Sixty one percent opted for a mobile connection, compared with 39 percent taking a landline. In the majority of the countries surveyed the number of mobile subscriptions outnumbers the population. Italy has the highest number of active mobile connections with 139 subscriptions per hundred people followed by the UK with115. The complete Ofcom tome can be read here. Other key findings include:

—Russia, Brazil, India and China are driving much of the growth in mobile phone take-up. Since 2001, over 660 million subscriptions have been added in these countries representing 40 percent of the total number of new mobile subscriptions globally.

—In India, the number of new mobile subscriptions doubled to 150 million during 2006. This increase is more than the entire number of mobile subscribers in the UK (70 million connections). However, penetration is still low in India at 14 percent, demonstrating the large potential for growth that remains in this country.

—After making calls, mobiles are mainly used to send text messages. People in China send more text messages than in any other country. In 2006, 429 billion texts were sent in China, an equivalent of 967 text messages per mobile user. This compares to 43 billion texts sent in the UK, an average of 621 per mobile user.

—As the number of mobiles has increased the number of landlines has declined in most of the countries surveyed each year since 2001. Between 2001 and 2006 the number of landlines in the Netherlands fell by 17 percent while the US and Japan both saw a drop of around 10 percent. In the UK, the number of landlines fell by 5 percent to 34 million homes. This smaller decrease in part reflects the fact that most households still require a landline in order to get a broadband service.

—The number of mobile-only households has also risen. In Italy, 38 percent of households are mobile only, compared to around 13 percent in the UK and 10 percent in Germany. By the end of 2006 there were, for the first time in the UK, more households with a mobile connection than a landline.

—Accessing the internet from a mobile phone is growing in popularity. In Japan, where over half of mobile phones use a 3G network, mobile users are three times more likely to send an email from their mobiles as they are a text message. However, Europeans send more text messages with 75 percent of mobile phone users in the UK, France, Germany and Italy sending SMS messages regularly.

—Mobile handsets are increasingly being used in other ways than for making calls. The report shows that over half of Europeans use their mobiles to take photos and, in the UK, a quarter of users record their own video clips and listen to music through their mobile. In the UK, 33 percent of mobile users send picture messages on their mobile, 16 percent use it to connect to the internet and 10 percent use their mobile for email.