Mobile matters

Mobile phones are essential items for millions of people across the UK. Whether it’s for work, keeping in touch with family or shopping online, staying connected has never mattered more – particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To better understand the changing ways in which people use their mobile services, and the experience they receive, Ofcom has analysed crowdsourced data collected between January and April 2020 from around 200,000 Android devices across the UK.

In this report, we focus on the share of connections across wireless network technologies (2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi), the success rate for mobile connections, response times and patterns in the ways people use their mobile phones. We also look at how these vary by factors such as location, day of the week and time of day.