The last 10 years has seen the most rapid technology change and growth in Australia’s history with a surge in smartphone adoption, spending on digital good and services and adoption of home and personal technology products.
The Telsyte Australian Digital Consumer Study 2021, the first produced after the COVID-19 pandemic, shows the acceleration of our adoption of tech devices and services.
This report has been published since 2008 and has provided a detailed insight and forecasts about the trends in tech usage, digital trends and changing consumer lifestyles.
The last decade has seen rapid change with a shift to online and digital services which have been enabled by mobile technology and faster internet services.
The number of internet–connected devices in Australia has grown six-fold in the past 10 years from less than 35 million in 2010 to more than 193 million in 2020.
Smartphone usage has also seen extraordinary growth.
The device has become a central part of our lifestyles and usage has increased by 390 per cent from 4.4 million devices in 2010 to 21.6 million in 2020.
And with the rollout of the NBN and faster mobile broadband, our access to the internet has also soared.
The Telsyte study shows that today 30 per cent of Australians are now on a 100Mbps or faster compared to 78 per cent that were on ADSL plans with an average speed of less than 15Mbps in 2010.
And those faster connections have also enabled higher data usage with the average increasing by 793 per cent from 28GB monthly usage in 2010 to 250GB in 2020.
The global pandemic has also helped the huge growth in online shopping.
In 2020, the Australian eCommerce market was worth $32.9 billion – which is triple the value of the market in 2010 when we generated $11.5 billion.
Digital goods and services including online entertainment and apps has increased six-fold from $2.2 billion in 2010 t0 $14.4 billion in 2020.
This was also the decade we were introduced to streaming video on demand services which grew 40-fold between 2014 and 2020 with more than 16 million services.
Three in five households were using at least on SVOD by the end of 2020.
And looking to the future, our adoption of technology is only going to increase, according to Telsyte.
We can look forward to faster Gigabit speeds on the NBN and rapidly expanding 5G footprint.
Smart speakers will also include their rapid growth and also enable even faster smart home adoption with sales predicted to increase by more than 50 per cent in the next few years.
Take-up of entertainment subscription services (video, pay TV, music and games) is also expected to grow and mirror our improving internet access.
Telsyte says the number of subscriptions will increase by 58 per cent from 37 million in 2020 to 58 million by 2024.
