Research company Opensignal says that, in spite of this, “we’ve not seen time on Wifi return to pre-crisis levels, indicating that people continue to spend more time at home than they did before the pandemic.”
The Opensignal report, by senior technical analyst Francesco Rizzato, also says that mobile speeds are slowly increasing towards pre-lockdown levels in many countries – such as Italy, Malaysia and Qatar – where 4G download speeds previously dropped in March.
Operators have been offering “resilient services for their mobile users during this unprecedented situation, although a few countries showed some drops in speeds”, said Rizzato.
“We identified a number of drivers that have likely contributed to those speed drops, including increasing mobile data consumption, operators relaxing data limits, changes in the time and location of users’ mobile usage, as well as pre-emptive measures adopted by operators to ensure continuity of service on their networks.”
The move away from Wifi, though still small, is more evident in some countries than others. In Australia, users were spending 60.4% of their time on Wifi in mid-March, but by the end of May the share had dropped four percentage points to 56.1%.
In Europe, Belgium went from 77.7% on Wifi in late March to 70.8% in late May, while the UK went from 77.0% down more modestly to 73.9% – perhaps reflecting the UK’s higher death toll because of the virus.
In Brazil, one of the worst hit countries in the world, people are still spending 73.8% of their smartphone time on Wifi. The US, with the world’s highest death toll, Wifi’s share has dropped 4.6 percentage points from 62.9% to 58.3%.
“We have also seen 4G download speeds rise back to normal levels in all countries except South Africa and the Netherlands,” said Rizzato. “In South Africa our users are still experiencing 4G download speeds 14.8% lower compared to the median value for the first ten weeks of the year, while our users in the Netherlands have most recently seen for the first time speeds decrease more than 5% compared to pre-lockdown levels.”
