The report says that the number of people using their phone to surf the web currently stands at 13.5m people. This has almost tripled since 2008, when the figure stood at 5.7m.

Concurrently, the use of mobile data has exploded, the report said, increasing by 240% between 2007 and 2009.

It suggested that, in part, much of this increase had been driven by one site – Facebook – which accounts for 45% of all mobile web use in the UK, followed by Google at 8%.

“All of the others have less than 4% market share,” said Mr Philips.