The Mobile Data Association (MDA) has stated that people using their mobile phones to access the Internet are becoming increasingly common.

British mobile users downloaded 524 million Internet pages to their phones in January, jumping by a quarter on December figures, as sales of new handsets and marketing of services increased interest in cell phone surfing.

The daily average of 17 million compares with 13.5 million in December and 12 million in November, and coincided with the sale over Christmas of hundreds of thousands of new phones geared to make mobile gaming and Internet access simpler.

The Mobile Data Association (MDA) said there were now around 25 million mobile Internet-enabled handsets in Britain, and it expects to see a total of eight billion wireless application protocol (WAP) page impressions this year.