Almost three quarters of Canadian households now own at least one cell phone, according to a new Harris/Decima survey commissioned by the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA).

The survey revealed that a full 72 per cent of Canadian homes have access to at least one wireless phone and 69 per cent of households have two or more.

“Essentially, more Canadians are using wireless phones, usage of wireless phones is deeper within each household and Canadians continue to consider them viable alternatives to their traditional home phone,” said Paul Musca, Senior Consultant at Harris/Decima. “In 2008, we found that 6 per cent of Canadian households report being cell-only. And given that in 2006 approximately 5 per cent of Canadian households had a cell phone exclusively, the value observed in 2008 represents a 20 per cent increase in just two years.”

Apart from voice calls, the study found that text messaging and picture-taking top the list of the most common activities performed on mobile phones. The use of text messaging has grown enormously from 25 per cent of wireless users in 2006 to 44 per cent in 2008; picture-taking has gone from 15 per cent to 38 per cent; and the use of multimedia messaging has increased from 3 per cent to 13 per cent.

“Canadians continue to be some of the most enthusiastic mobile phone users in the world, averaging more than 400 minutes of talk time each month,” said Bernard Lord, CWTA President and CEO. “And text messaging volumes continue to soar with growth rates in excess of 100 per cent per year. In the first six months of this year, Canadians sent close to 9 billion text messages, with a current daily count of more than 54 million.”

The complete 2008 Wireless Attitudes Study is available on the CWTA Web site.