• The Australian Communications and Media Authority

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08 July 2011The internet service market in Australia is dynamic, characterised by continual innovation in internet service provider (ISP) offerings, take-up of innovative consumer access devices and increased consumer participation in the online environment. These are some of the key findings from the latest ACMA research into the emerging digital economy, The internet service market and Australians in the online environment, released on Tuesday 5th July.

At December 2010, there were nearly 10.4 million active internet subscribers in Australia using fixed and mobile wireless (dongle, datacard, USB mode) services and 8.2 million internet subscribers using mobile phone handsets - across the household, business and government sectors.

The availability of internet services over mobile networks continues to grow. Mobile wireless subscriber numbers increased by 49 per cent in the 12 months to December 2010, while mobile phone handset subscribers increased at a comparable, but slightly lower, rate (21 per cent over the six months to December 2010).

However, growth in these services has not occurred at the expense of fixed-line access technologies, with ADSL (subscriber numbers also increasing by seven per cent over the 12 month period. Fixed-line internet services continue to play a central role in driving the digital economy accounting for the majority (91 per cent) of data downloads in Australia. During the December quarter of 2010, nearly 175,000 terabytes of data were downloaded via fixed-line services in Australia, compared to 16,990 terabytes downloaded via mobile wireless services (dongles, datacards and USB modems) and just 4,029 terabytes downloaded via mobile phone handsets.

More Australians are going online and becoming more intensive users of the internet. Nearly 15.1 million (83 per cent) persons aged 14 years and over went online during the December quarter of 2010, up from 14.2 million during the same period in 2009. At December 2010, 71 per cent of internet users went online at least once a day, compared to 67 per cent at December 2009 and 63 per cent at December 2008.

Approximately 7.4 million people accessed retail and auction web sites, 8.4 million people accessed social networking sites and 5.5 million accessed video streaming sites from home during the month of December 2010 alone. Table 8 shows that the most visited e-commerce sites by Australians are eBay (4.2 million people), Amazon (1.7 million) and the shopping.com.au network (1.3 million). The growth of e-commerce is further reflected in latest ABS numbers which shows that nearly $143 billion in online orders were received by Australian businesses during 2009–10, a 15 per cent increase over the 2008–09 period.