52% of Australians are using 4G – and nearly 2 million have downloaded Pokemon Go

Australians are adopting faster internet speeds says analyst firm Telesyte in their new study looking at the Australian mobile landscape that they have released today.

Overall, Telesyte reports that we now have 25-million mobile services in operation (SIO) in Australia, which with a population of just over 23-million proves we’re a mobile-centric country and the majority of those users are expanding to 4G services.

The study, which collated information from service providers, mobile operators, content providers and channel partners as well as an online survey of over 1,000 Australians last year, says that 52% of Australians now use 4G for their mobile service. The trend towards using 4G service is expected to expand quickly with Telesyte expecting to see 85% of Australians using the faster service by 2020.

The study points to faster download speeds encouraging more competition among carriers to obtain more customers, all of whom are downloading or streaming music, video and of course games such as Pokemon Go, which Telesyte estimates that 2 million Australian smartphone users have downloaded the game by the end of last month.

Part of the trend for competition is a growth in the BYO market, as well as the option to shop around. More customers are shopping around too, with many Telstra customers especially looking around after an outage filled first half of 2016. Up to two-thirds of those customers looking around are opting for ‘non-contract plans’ an increase of 10% year-over-year in 2015 leading to less long term subscriptions.

Despite the outages, an Open Signal report released in June showed that Telstra still retained the fastest speed crown in Australia with an average download speed of 23.60Mbps. In terms of network availability Vodafone and Telstra networks were accesible more than 75% of the time with Vodafone offering LTE 77.6% of the time and Telstra offering at 76.21% of the time, while Optus still performed well with LTE available 73.4% of the time.

Vodafone announced their financial results last week, announcing they had grown their customer base by 239,000 customers (a 4.5% increase) year on year to 5.5 million customers, obviously with some blowback from the Telstra outages. Optus and Telstra will be releasing their financial results next week, which will allow a look at what their numbers have to say.

All three carriers have announced expansion and improvements of their 4G networks across Australia with Vodafone and Telstra both involved in improving regional and Blackspot areas. Though Optus has been busily upgrading their network as well.