Exam Paper

My article "The whole of the net in your hand" is taken from the BBC website. In the following there is an extract. To see the full article please visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7017866.stm

The whole of the net in your hand
[…]
Pattern recognition
The numbers of mobile phone users accessing the web is growing steadily. The most recent figures available, for February 2007, from the Mobile Data Association show that almost 15 million people use the web via their handsets each month.
T-Mobile was the first in the UK to bring in a flat-rate pricing plan for net use under the banner of its "web and walk" service.
Richard Warmsley, head of internet on the move at T-Mobile, said more than 500,000 people had signed up to "web and walk" in the 18 months since it was launched.
Lifestyle changes and the increasingly connected lives of 21st Century Britons was driving many people to use the service, he said.
"Usage is as diverse as the people using it," he said.
Increasingly, he said, what people do on a PC they want to do on a phone too.
"Social networking has rocketed up the charts recently," he said. Sites such as Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and eBay have become very popular destinations for customers.
"Half of our customers surf the internet on their mobile when they are at home watching TV," he said. "They do not need to go to a laptop and fire it up. The mobile is there for them."
[…]
Flat rate prices, accelerating mobile data speeds, increasing numbers of handsets that are web capable and the tearing down of the walls around operators' portals have all helped to "liberate usage" among customers.

UK MOBILE DATA PLANS
Vodafone - £7.50 a month (120MB monthly limit)
T Mobile - £7.50 a month (1GB monthly limit)
Orange - £8 a month (30MB monthly limit)
3 - £5 a month (1GB monthly limit)
02 - £7.50 (200MB monthly limit)

[…]
Statistics gathered by Novarra show that open web browsing boosts data downloads from an average of 0.18 megabytes per day to 0.6.
Operators had started to realise too that, for many, the mobile phone is the gadget they carry with them all day and may become the preferred way to access the net.
[…]

Questions
The questions 1, 2 and 3 can be answered mainly by reference to the article.
Question 4 should be answered by making detailed reference to examples from your case study material to support points made in your answer.


1) State 3 pieces of statistical evidence from the passage which indicate the extent of people using the web via their mobile phone.

2) What do the operators have to consider when making offers?

3) What caused people using their mobile phone for accessing the web?

4) How influential is New Media Technology on the future of the advertising industry?

Good luck! :-)