Orange sees dongle sales rise by 500%
June 26, 2009 at 3:30 pm
The booming popularity of mobile broadband is no secret, but the true extent of its popularity has just been made even clearer now that Orange has revealed that its dongle sales are up 500% over the last year. On top of that, mobile handset data usage has also risen by 108%, which brings to 3.8 million the number of Orange customers who are either on a 3G mobile handset or have bought a dongle.
The details were released on the company’s Digital Media Index report, which also highlights the fact that dongle data usage has seen a huge rise of over 4,000% in the last year.
The director of products at Orange, Paul Jevons, said that the “explosion” of mobile applications and embedded laptops means that the demand for mobile data will increase enormously in the coming months and years.
But despite the obvious popularity of mobile broadband, there are no signs that it will take over from fixed-line broadband anytime soon. Michael Phillips from BroadbandChoices.co.uk told the BBC that people use mobile broadband more for social networking and news, whereas a fixed-line broadband has faster speeds and bigger download limits and is therefore used differently.
This seems to be confirmed by Orange’s announcement that of the most searched-for categories, social networking came top of the list, with downloads, ringtones and games following closely behind.
But with the growth of mobile broadband, new challenges will arise. The BBC has highlighted the huge demands that will be put on the networks to deal with increasing amounts of data. As the networks are put under ever-increasing strain, the speeds could well suffer as a result. So despite the figures from Orange, it’s clear that the technology is still in its infancy and has a long way to go yet.
