The chart illustrate the total amount of minutes of phone calls in the UK separated in three main categories: local calls on a fixed line, national and international calls on a fixed line, and mobile calls. Units are measured in billions of minutes.
Overall, the majority of minutes reported for the period studied are atributable to local calls on fixed lines, followed by national and international calls on fixed lines. Mobile calls represent the lowest number of minutes that were spent in telephone calls. Both national and international calls on fixed line and calls made from mobiles follow and upward tendency reaching their peaks in 2002. With regards to local calls, it started with the lowest quantity of minutes for those calls in 1995, peaked in 1999 and went back to this low amount registered in 1995 by the end of the period.
Fixed line national and international calls presented an steady rise from 1995 to 2002. At the beginning of the period, only 30 billion of telephone calls made in the UK were from national and international fixed lines. This value doubled by the end of the period, reaching a total of 60 billion of minutes made from this type of fixed line calls. Similarly, the minutes of phone calls in the UK made from mobiles started from its lowest value in 1995 with nearly 5 billion of minutes to consistently increase over the years to be almost ten times this value by the end of 2002.
With regards to local calls, made from a fixed line, the amount of minutes showed a particular fluctuation. In 1995, the number of minutes from local calls on fixed line was 70 billion and showed a consistent increase until 1999 where it peaked with 90 billion of minutes. After this, it went down steadily until 2002 where it came back to the 70 billion of minutes, the same amount as the start of the period studied.