Canadian ownership of tablets soars

Canadians are increasingly using tablet computers, with nearly half the population owning a device in 2014, up 10 points from the previous year, the government telecommunications agency said Tuesday.

Combined with more subscriptions to faster Internet services and strong smartphone sales, Canadians "are able to participate more actively in the evolving digital economy," Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) chair Jean-Pierre Blais said in a statement.

While tablet ownership increased to 49 percent, the precentage of Canadians with access to fourth-generation (LTE or long-term evolution) wireless networks jumped to 93 last year, said the CRTC.

The networks owned by Bell, Rogers and Telus—which dominate the Canadian telecommunications sector—and a few smaller firms served 28.8 million Canadians, the agency said. There were also 2.6 million machine-to-machine connections reported in 2014.

The percentage of Canadians with smartphones grew to 67 percent while more and more land lines were cut.

The switchover from landlines has given Canadians access to mobile applications, multimedia services, social networking, Internet browsing and other data-intensive activities on their wireless devices.

And they have been loving it. Canadians with a smartphone or tablet used an average of nearly 1 gigabyte of data per month, according to the report.

© 2015 AFP