“The smartphone is the Swiss knife of our lives”

If you ask people in Austria what they do with their smartphones, the WhatsApp chat service (87 percent), photography (83 percent) and the alarm clock function (68 percent) are mentioned most frequently. Only two percent stated that they only use the mobile phone for making calls. This was recently shown by a survey by the Forum Mobilkommunikation (FMK).

“The smartphone is the Swiss knife of our modern life”, said FMK managing director Margit Kropik. People make more calls than before Corona.

After a corona-related record in 2020, the number of call minutes fell again, but in 2022 at 23.7 billion they were 1.4 billion minutes ahead of the time before Corona (2019). The reason for this is the trend towards more home offices, which is also making people use their smartphones for work. The number of active SIM cards also rose from 20.8 million in 2021 to 24 million in the previous year, which also has something to do with a steadily increasing number of SIM cards in tablets and laptops, according to FMK President Volker Libovsky.

banking and navigation

In addition to WhatsApp, for photos and as an alarm clock, people also use their smartphones to do their banking (64 percent), to send or receive SMS (also 64 percent), for navigation or as a route planner, as an organizer, calendar or for Emails (61 percent each), according to the survey of 500 people conducted in March. A comparable survey from 2017 shows that use has increased in all areas and that smartphones are now being used for things for which they were not used at the time. This includes online banking, Facebook, eGovernment, mobile phone signature, Instagram, paying and buying parking tickets via mobile phone.

With so much mobile phone use, the mobile data volume is also huge: the data volume transmitted via mobile networks last year was 4.061 billion gigabytes (GB) after 3.824 billion before. Ten years ago, just before the introduction of LTE, it was 72.8 million GB.

A lot of money for the 5G expansion

Austria’s mobile network operators achieved sales of 3.375 billion euros in 2022, which was only around three percent more than the year before. The industry invested a total of 881 million euros. The Forum Mobilkommunikation expects a total investment volume of another three billion euros by 2030. Much of this will flow into the 5G expansion. Half of the 18,500 mobile phone sites currently active in Austria are equipped with 5G systems.