Rural youth is ahead of the wireless curve with 78% of rural teen...

predicted wireless penetration of the U.S. youth market as a whole wouldn’t reach 75% until 2006. “Young people have become the ‘early adopters’ of the telecom industry. They are the telecom subscriber base of tomorrow,” NTCA wireless analyst Athena Platis said at a news briefing on the study Mon. She said identifying teenagers’ telecom preferences was “critical” to rural telcos wanting to capture their business and gain their long-term brand loyalty. The study said despite the high number of mobile users, text messaging was significantly less popular with rural teens. While on a national level, 28% of teens said they sent or received at least one text message a day, 63% of rural teens said they never used it, 19% rarely and only 6% frequently, the study said. About 93% of rural teens used postpaid plans and only 7% used prepaid plans. Nationally, prepaid subscriber accounts make up less than 10% of the wireless market, the study said. Parents drive the wireless youth market, purchasing almost 60% of phones, with nearly all of the remaining 40% of teenagers paying for their own cellphones and services. The research found teens had disposable income of $400 a month, and 64% of rural teens said they spent $26- $50 a month on cellphone services. “Telcos hoping to gain young customers should update product portfolios accordingly,” Platis said. The “cellphone as safety device” mentality is gaining momentum, she said. She cited Yankee Group research showing that 60% of parents listed “security and emergency purposes” as the primary reason for giving a cellphone to their teenager. Platis said several states, such as Cal., Ill., Md., Nev. and Va., had repealed statewide bans on cellphones in schools. The study said more than 60% of rural teens were primary users of landline phone service for local calls. However, 8% said they used their wireless phone on a daily basis and 7% said they had completely abandoned their landline phones. The study said only 7% of rural teens chose their provider based on service quality, while almost 39% made their decisions based on the minutes package provided. Of those who didn’t have a cellphone, almost 46% said it was too expensive, 32% said they didn’t need it, 11% cited poor service and 1.6% service availability. Web surfers were slowly switching to high- speed Internet connection, the report said. It said 57% of respondents named dial-up as their mode of Internet connection, down from 69% a year earlier, but DSL still came in 2nd with 69% of the market. Cable and wireless accounted for 13% and 4%, respectively, the study said. It said as high-speed connections became more common, the time spent online decreased, with 40% of respondents saying they spent less than one hour a day online. It said rural teens were moving away from music, news and sports pages towards academic (42%) and entertainment-focused (31%) sites. There’s a “window of opportunity” to gain new wireless and wireline customers between the beginning of the last year at high school and the end of the first year at college, when young people “begin to exercise their telecom preferences and seem to migrate toward products that allow for customization,” Platis said. She said as 58% of respondents plan to live in rural area after they get their degrees, “rural carriers could benefit from building strong customer relationships now with what will be their subscriber base of tomorrow.”