British consumers are getting some of the best deals for broadband, mobile and television services in Europe, thanks to cheap bundled services, according to an exhaustive report from Ofcom, looking into global trends in the £870 billion television, radio and telecommunications sectors in 2006 to help it better place the UK markets in a worldwide context. The second annual International Communications Market report found that 40 percent of UK households buying a bundled service, paid £25 a month for landline, basic pay-TV and the internet, compared with £27.22 in France and £39.77 in Germany. As a result, people are logging on, watching TV, and using their mobile phones in comparably high numbers.

The study also found a marked trend toward convergence, with mobile phones, for example, being used increasingly for services other than voice calls. The report shows that, in the UK, a quarter of users record their own video clips and listen to music through their mobile, while 33 percent of mobile users send picture messages on their mobile, 16 percent use it to connect to the internet and 10 percent use their mobile for email. The entire report can be read here.

Key findings from the report after the jump…

--Internet: UK adults are hooked on social networking sites—much more so than their European neighbours. Forty percent of UK adults report visiting social networks regularly, spending an average of 5.3 hours each month on them and returning to them an average 23 times in the month. Internet advertising is surging in the UK. UK advertisers spend more on internet advertising per person than those in any other country surveyed, paying out £33 per head. This is twice as much as France, Germany and Italy combined. At 14 percent of total revenues, spend in the UK on online advertising overtook magazine advertising for the first time and was more than the total spend on outdoor, cinema, and radio advertising combined.

--Broadband :Broadband adoption continues to increase in the UK, with over half of all households connected at the end of 2006, putting the UK slightly ahead of the US for the first time. The majority (68 percent) of UK consumers were satisfied with their broadband speed, despite the fact that the actual speed of their line was less than the advertised speed of 8Mbit/s or higher.

--Mobile: Mobile are rapidly replacing landlines across the countries surveyed. In the UK, the number of landlines fell by five per cent to 34 million homes, but this small decrease reflects the fact that most households still require a landline in order to get a broadband service. By the end of 2006, there were, for the first time in the UK, more households with a mobile connection than a landline. Third-generation mobile services are becoming more widespread. But compared to Japan, where over 50 percent of mobiles were 3G, Europe still lags. In comparison over 10 per cent of mobiles in Italy, Sweden and the UK were 3G. In Japan, thanks to strong 3G penetration, mobile users are three times more likely to send an email from their mobiles as they are a text message. However, Europeans send more text messages with 75 per cent of mobile phone users in the UK, France, Germany and Italy sending SMS messages regularly.

--Digital TV: The UK has the highest take-up of digital television of the twelve countries surveyed. At the end of 2006, 76 per cent of UK households were digital, driven mainly by growth in digital terrestrial television (Freeview). The US and Japan were next with 61 and 60 per cent respectively.