Mobile matters

We found that just over two-thirds of the time (69%), people were connected to wifi rather than cellular networks when using their mobile devices. When they were connected to cellular networks (2G, 3G, 4G), 82% of the time was spent connected to 4G. This varied depending on where people were and which mobile network they used. People in urban areas were more likely to be connected using wifi – and in turn 4G – than those in rural areas, which can be attributed to the greater access to wifi in offices and public spaces, and higher availability of 4G networks in urban areas.

But often a connection is not enough: the majority of mobile apps need access to data services in order to provide full functionality. Our analysis shows that when people were connected to 4G networks, they were able to use data services on average 98.8% of the time. This average was lower for 3G connections, which were nearly four times more likely to fail than 4G connections. Throughout the day the proportion of tests that failed on both 3G and 4G remained constant, despite more people connecting to the network during peak times.

One thing that did vary significantly throughout the day was consumers’ data use. The proportion of data used on cellular networks peaked between 5 and 6pm, when people were likely to be travelling home from work, while the proportion of wifi use was higher between 6 and 10pm when they were more likely to be at home and have access to wifi. The amount of data used over wifi was much higher than on mobile technologies; only 10% of people used more than 5GB of mobile data on average each month, compared to 47% on wifi. Just under half of people used less than 500MB of mobile data each month.

Mobile calls remain an important means of communication for many people, with our crowdsourced data showing that only six per cent of people did not make a call during the three-month fieldwork period. For the 94% of panellists who did, almost a third made more than 50 calls per month. However, calls were fairly short on average; over eighty per cent of calls were shorter than five minutes, with the majority of these under ninety seconds, indicating that people are making frequent but relatively short calls.