COVID-19 – UK Smartphone Users Spend More Time on WiFi
The latest data from Opensignal, which conducts crowd-sourced testing of 3G, 4G and 5G Mobile networks, has perhaps unsurprisingly revealed that the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis is causing more Smartphone users to go online via WiFi from home broadband instead of mobile data.
In the United Kingdom, Opensignal first detected a “statistically significant week-on-week increase” in the percentage of time British Smartphone users were spending on WiFi in the third week of March (starting March 16th). Time on WiFi rose by 6.4% week-on-week to 68.9% in the third week of March, up from the 64.7% seen in the previous week.
All of this naturally coincides with the growing movement toward home working, which will have probably peaked even higher last week once schools were closed (sadly the table below doesn’t go that far).
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Other countries also observed an increase in Time on Wifi in the third week of March, including the U.S.A, Spain, Germany and Switzerland. By comparison the testing giant first saw a significant increase in this measure of the mobile experience in Italy and South Korea in the last week of February (starting February 24), which is because they were some of the first to be hit.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Three is broken for a week now for me.
2TB +on Virgin Mobile here – nothing wrong
Nice! Haha!
Indeed! – I know VF are 3.7TB but VM don’t publish any limit – Anyway as there are many many on here who demand proof – let me save you the bother.
https://i.postimg.cc/9XpF0fjt/Screenshot-20200225-200131.jpg
That was last month – I could have done more but I ran out of puff! Not bad seeing as I left VM last year but it still goes on and is free 🙂
Just under 2TB my apologies all fact checkers out there. 🙂
At some point, Pete, the novelty of bragging about your bandwidth consumption will hopefully wear off.
Though it’s been upwards of a decade and still no sign.
I’ve just checked my usage for March: mobile data 173MB, WiFi 8.19GB. So, WiFi usage is over 47 times more than mobile data, be interesting to see if other peoples’ usage turns out to be similar next month.
Agreed. I have a Sky Mobile sim with 1GB on just for the free streaming when I am away from home – Been using it constantly but of course that’s not recorded anywhere. So for me I still have 1GB left.