British people are not using their mobile phones to make calls any more.
This will be news to anyone who has had to catch a train from Nottingham to London and put up with a grey suited jerk shouting into his phone as if the person was several miles away (you know who you are).
However according to mobile comparison site Dialtosave.co.uk, the number of minutes UK consumers want from a mobile phone contract has more than halved in less than a year.
Your average mobile phone user would be happy barking into their handset for just 10 minutes per day, or 300 minutes per month.
More than three times as many consumers want 300 minutes per month as require 600 minutes a month. Hardly anyone wants a contract for 900 minutes.
Over a year ago it was average for a person to be looking for 600 minutes.
What they replace it with is SMS. Richard Cappin, DialToSave's founder said that punters want to surf, use their social networks, and send texts, much more than they want to talk.
He pointed out that people were comfortable sending text messages in public places than they are making voice calls. Well other than grey suit, of course, he is happy telling us all what time he will be getting into work every bloody day, so you have to move outside the country to get away from it.
Another thing that punters have woken up to is that selling their souls for a 24 month contract is better than shorter contracts.
Nearly 90 per cent of all searches were for two year contracts, compared to nearly ten percent for 18 month contracts. Hardly anyone wants a year long contract.
http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/febstats
Maybe Marconi -- those dits and dahs formed out of arc-welder noise surely did away with some of those leisurely conversations on the front porch or down at the local, and once Armstrong's CW contraptions took the airwaves over from sparkgap there was room for a lot more twentieth-century tweeting, and it had a lot more range. But then, SFB Morse takes some blame, too, for making finger-talking so easy. It's truly a slippery slope -- first you're texting with people across town, and then, with a little improvement to your antenna, you're texting people around the globe. By finding people to communicate with, people who actually share your interests instead of grunting noncommittally and waiting for you to go away, you're neglecting your human responsibilities, right?
It's down to Ben Franklin and his ilk: they're to blame. We managed to slow down rail travel at first with flagmen, and the same for horseless carriages, but those nasty electrons always did move faster than a man could walk. People have been running away from their responsibilities to meet in meatspace ever since.