Results show the hype is real: Telstra customers are embracing the mobile revolution.

A lot of numbers were revealed at the half year results announcement this week. Among these was the story of how Australians, and more specifically Telstra customers, have radically changed the way they use their mobile phones.

They show that our addiction to the mobile – be that for texting, talking, browsing and snapping – is not faltering. In fact our mobile subscribers have smashed the nine million mark, and are:

• Addicted to text – in just 12 months our customers boosted their text habit by 44.8 per cent. This translates to an almost an additional billion texts over the six months covered by our results and very busying fingers. In fact over the past six months Telstra customers sent 3,224,000,000 text messages which works out to be a whopping 17,665,753 per day.
• Never lost for words – our customers are yakking on their mobiles more than ever before. In fact our customers spent an additional 772 million minutes talking on their mobiles – an 18.6 per cent increase on the same six months last year. To put this into context, our customers made 4,919,000,000 minutes of calls in the past six months – or on average 26,953,424 minutes each day – that’s a lot of dry mouths from all that talking.
• Embracing the move from 2G to 3G – Telstra customers are quickly making the move to the mobile of the future. At the end of January 2008 Telstra had more than three and a half million 3G mobiles connected – up from just one million at the start of 2007. To put that into the broader picture, more than 38 per cent of Telstra’s total mobile subscriber base is on 3G and 40 per cent of 3G connections are new Telstra customers. Welcome aboard.
• The hype is real, gone are the days of just talk and text – Remember when your mobile phone was a brick? Well that ‘brick’ is now capable of new data services and more people are logging on with their mobile for mobile internet browsing and watching mobile TV. The proof – while Telstra’s non-messaging data revenue grew 83.7 per cent, wireless broadband grew an extraordinary 205 per cent.

And this is just the beginning. Last week we announced that Telstra would be the first mobile operator in the world to upgrade to 21 Mbps later this year, with 42 Mbps still slated for 2009. Times are a-changing, and our customers are keeping pace!