10 Million British Adults a Week Logging on to Public WiFi

Hotspot operator The Cloud (BSkyB) has estimated that more than 10 million British adults (around 22% of the entire nation) are logging on to one of their various public wireless internet access points every week and 2.8 million (6%) connect every day.

Some 33% of 25-34-year-olds use public wifi each week, which falls to 19% for 45-54-year-olds and 10% for people aged 55 or older. Overall 35% tend to log-on for more than 15 minutes on average, and 8% for more than half an hour.

London is home to the greatest proportion of high street WiFi users (47%), although users in Nottingham, Cardiff and Sheffield spend at least 50% longer online in a typical session. Users in Bristol, Cardiff, Nottingham and Reading also download on average 50% more data per session than Londoners.

Vince Russell, MD of The Cloud, said:

“As smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices become ubiquitous, we’re increasingly looking to take our in-home internet experience out and about with us. With 3G connections frequently throttled and 4G not yet a mass-market proposition, this means many of us are turning to high-speed WiFi.

As a result, we’re seeing shops, cafes, pubs, gyms and other places where people live their lives looking to meet this demand by offering free WiFi to their customers.

Some seven million people pass through The Cloud’s venues every day, with hotspots ranging from Wick in the Highlands to Penzance in Cornwall, all in the kinds of venues where people want to take time to surf the web, catch up on emails, news and sport, and even listen to music or stream HD video.”

According to The Cloud, there were also more than two billion minutes spent online using public WiFi in the first 10 weeks of 2013 alone, with more than 800 million Megabytes of information downloaded in total.

The Cloud is home to around 18,000 wifi hotspots in the UK and customers of Sky Broadband (excluding the FREE broadband service) benefit from unrestricted access. It’s claimed that around 200 new venues are added to The Cloud’s network every week.