It was meant to be a key part of a new age of mobile telecommunications, giving consumers the same benefits that they could get from their computers at home, but yesterday mobile phone operators were told that Britain’s failure to embrace the internet via mobile phones was their fault.

The industry’s lack of transparency over the cost of accessing the web on handsets was, the Mobile Data Association said, restricting the growth of mobile internet.

Research from the not-for-profit data collection body, which is funded by the mobile industry, has found that, while 25 per cent more people are using the internet on their mobiles than they were two years ago, growth would have been a lot greater if operators had been more open with consumers.

“We are calling for greater price transparency on the costs associated with using the mobile internet,” Steve Reynolds, the chairman of the Mobile Data Association, said. “The findings of this report suggest a real consumer appetite, but confusion and fear over costs may be holding back growth.”

Vodafone said last week that more of its customers were using the mobile internet, with increased operator contracts with free e-mail and easier access to 3G believed to be key reasons. While Vodafone surprised the market last week by warning sales would hit the bottom end of forecasts, it said that total turnover in Britain had risen by 2.1 per cent thanks to a 31 per cent increase in the use of data services such as mobile internet.

The association said, however, that real growth in mobile data services had come from text messaging, which has grown by 30 per cent in the past year. About 1.4 billion text messages are sent every week in Britain, it said.

Mr Reynolds said: “The growth of text messaging continues to defy expectation. The growth curve is set to continue as new devices promote messaging applications at the centre of their functionality.” He said that the popularity of text messaging was in part the result of the ability of customers to understand the cost.

Video messaging has grown by 30 per cent year-on-year, with ten million picture messages being sent every week in Britain. “The proliferation of camera-enabled devices has been the key, but improved and automated settings have made the process simpler for the end user,” the association said.

Global revenues from mobile data services are expected to exceed $200 billion (£100.2 billion) this year, up from $157 billion in 2007, driven by the expansion of advanced networks and popular web-browsing devices such as Apple’s iPhone. Moreover, the Mobile Data Association said that there were signs that mobile internet access would challenge or even supersede that from a traditional PC. A study in the United States has found that iPhone owners were responsible for one in a thousand web page views last month.

“New operator pricing combined with new function-rich, internet-enabled devices, such as the iPhone and Nokia N95, are key to driving adoption of mobile internet access,” it said.

In May 2006, 13.1 million people accessed the internet on their mobiles. Two years later the figure had risen only fractionally to 16.4 million.

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