We were regaled this week with the “news” that a schoolboy had been suspended after showing other students pornographic content on his mobile phone.

The resulting furore prompted Minister Helen Coonan to issue a statement and a coinage both evocative and memorable: she declared that in the wrong hands this ubiquitous device is capable of morphing into a “pipeline for perversion”. But perhaps this incident tells us more about how content makes its way onto the mobile handset.

Firstly, a pipeline? The industry should be flattered. Senator Coonan’s press release highlights one fact that has been evident for a while: recent advances in mobile phone and network technology are finally starting to deliver on the promise of the much-maligned “mobile Internet”.

The mobile web is is no longer the preserve of a determined hard core of early adopters, willing to brave obscene quality of service to have have rudimentary WAP pages delivered to a monochrome screen. At 9.6 kilobytes per second, this was more a dribble of depravity than pipeline of perversion.

There were 1.7 million WCDMA handset owners in Australia at June 2006, with strong growth in the first half set to quicken. With these advanced terminals, faster networks and improved browsers, users are venturing outside the walled garden for the first time. And in many cases, their destination is unsurprising.

Off the record, mobile search engine providers confirm that between 50-70% of the queries laboriously tapped in via the mobile keypad relate to adult content. The deeply personal nature of the mobile phone will encourage such behaviour – particularly while the majority of computers are shared.

Mostly, this demand for adult content is not being met by the relatively benign content offered within the operator portal. Mobile companies are understandably worried about the brand impact of being labelled purveyors of filth: judging by the press response this week, they have good reason for caution.

However, their difficulties are also technological – in most cases it is extremely difficult to implement a reliable and workable age verification system, a necessary precursor to supplying adult content with any control.

Operators such as 3 Australia are an exception. 3 has a relatively tight demographic focus on the young adult market. Additionally, 3 built an age verification system into its launch plans, with the result that it now has the most diverse adult offering. This generates revenue almost entirely from contract customers – it is still too cumbersome and embarrassing for prepaid users to prove their age via the “porn form”.

This lack of content from the operators means that customers are starting to venture off portal. And once they have the content on their mobile phone, then they will inevitably share it using bluetooth, Mini SD cards or the like – and teenage schoolboys are inevitably the most savvy users of this technology. However, more likely is that the content (of any type) is found on the web and then transferred to the phone, completely bypassing the operator network.

For the best defence against widespread access of mobile porn by teenagers and adults may not be the rules proposed by Senator Coonan to prohibit “content rated X18 and above, as well as [put in place] requirements for consumer advice and age restrictions on access to content suited only to adults.”

In practice, determined and net-savvy users will continue to access adult content hosted offshore as before. Yet exorbitant data charges of up to $23 per megabyte for users who stray outside the portal may mean that they access or download rich media adult content only once. Particularly if mum or dad is paying the bill.