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).

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.