The country’s regulator has shown that a rising number of Canadians own smartphones and are using them more.
According to mobile technology figures that have recently been released by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), two out of every three people in that country now own a smartphone and about half of the people of Canada have a tablet computer.
The CRTC’s report showed that Canadians are rapidly taking on some of the latest in consumer computing devices.
The three part report focused on the Canadian telecom industry as a whole. Within it, the CRTC said that in 2014, 67 percent of Canadians were smartphone owners. That was an increase over the figure from the year before, when 62 percent of Canadians owned those devices. That said when it came to the adoption of mobile technology, the ownership of tablets rose even faster than that of smartphones. Last year, 49 percent of people in the country owned tablets, where only 39 percent had owned them the year before.
Overall, it is clear that mobile technology is playing a growing role in the everyday lives of Canadians.
The report showed that there was a 1.5 percent increase in wireless subscribers in Canada from 2013 to 2014, rising to 28.8 million people. It also observed that the wireless networks being used by people in the country were also getting faster. What it determined was that 93 percent of Canadians had access to some form of LET (long term evolution) network by the close of last year. That represented a considerable increase, as the figure had been 81 percent in 2013.
This combination of faster networks and a greater penetration of mobile devices has also meant that residents of the country are increasing their data consumption. There was a 15 percent rise in data usage from 2013 to 2014, and the average data consumption of people who had either a smartphone or a tablet was about 1 gigabyte per month.
The country has now reached the point that it has more mobile technology owners than landline owners. That said, many consumers in the country still have both, with 20 percent of households having converted to mobile-only, while 14 percent are exclusively connected through landlines without any cell phone or tablet ownership.
