Apparently it would seem so as more than one third of workers would choose their mobile phone over their keys, digital music player, laptop and even their wallet should they be required to leave their house for twenty-four hours and could only take one thing with them according to a latest survey.

Market Research Company IGC conducted the survey which was sponsored by Nortel Networks Corp, and found 38% of the 2,367 people surveyed would choose their mobile phone while less than 30% would choose their wallet above all else. Nortel, who are North America’s largest maker of telephone gear, commissioned the survey looking to find out just how many workers around the globe could be defines as “hyperconnected” or those who have fully embraced the technologies of multiple devices such as mobile phones and laptop computers along with applications such as social networking site Facebook and email.

The answer they found was 16% and growing. The survey classified the hyperconnected worker as one who uses a minimum of seven devices for work and private access with the addition of at least nine apps such as text messaging, web conferencing and instant messaging. According to the study the country with the highest percentage of hyperconnected people is ( and I personally thought this would be quite obvious) China, while Canada and the UAE has the least number amongst the seventeen countries which were covered in the survey.

The survey also predicts a rise of 40 percent of hyperconnected people within the next five years, which could bode well for Toronto based Nortel who are relying heavily on the hopes that network demand and bandwidth rise as more and more devices connect to the net thus making the demand for network technologies it produces rise too.

Following the group of hard-core communications users is an even larger subset where 36% are designated as “increasingly connected,” these workers use a minimum of four devices and six applications. However, Nortel’s hope for an influx of new devices going online is yet to translate into a robust bottom line as Nortel has struggles since the technology bubble exploded previously this decade.

Nortel predicts their revenue growth for the coming year will be somewhere in the low single digits, and already announced 2,100 redundancies back in February above that of the 1,000 slashed since 2001. Nortel also estimate it could take years for some of the newer technologies it has designed to find large markets, and meanwhile competition is fierce as low cost Asian companies like Huawei Technologies fight for the market share.

On the Toronto Stock Exchange Nortel shares were down 30 Canadian cents to C$7.90, and in March they slumped down to C$6.45.

Source — Reuters