It doesn’t take a statistician to work out that we’ve all been online a lot in the last few months. From home schooling and streaming to ensuring your household has all the essentials (which may or may not have been purchased from Deliveroo), the number of gigabytes we’ve used and the time we’ve spent online has ticked ever upwards.
But exactly how much more are we online now? What’s using up most of our data? And what will happen as lockdown ends? Turns out it does take statisticians to work all that out – which is why we’ve looked at their reports to compile this list of five facts about you, the internet and your data usage. You’re welcome.
1. In lockdown, we’ve each been online for four hours and two minutes a day
You always knew you had it in you to be a record breaker, didn’t you? You were right. According to Ofcom’s new Online Nation 2020 report, an annual survey looking at how the UK’s internet usage is changing, the four hours and two minutes we’ve averaged online during lockdown is a new high. And it’s an increase of 37 minutes a day per online adult compared with January 2020.
Even without lockdown, we’ve been using the internet more than ever before. In the past year before we were locked down, we were online for 17 minutes a day more than the previous year. The biggest users? 18 to 24 year olds, who logged on for an hour more each day than adults overall.
2. Internet usage is unlikely to drop any time soon
Right now, we have a crystal ball that is helping us predict the UK’s post-lockdown internet habits. Take a look at China. And, indeed, Italy. According to RescueTime, an app that lets users monitor how long they spend online, neither Chinese nor Italian users’ internet habits have dropped back to what they were pre-lockdown. Even once people were free to go outside, the amount of time they spent online via desktops alone was higher than before, by as much as 21% in Italy or 10% in China. That’s the thing about being online: it’s fun to do more of. Particularly given that …
3. You’re 50% more likely to use your phone if you’ve … just used your phone
An analysis of 11,000 users of RescueTime showed that 50% of phone pick ups happened within three minutes of the previous one.
“That’s one of the more interesting stats that we found,” says Jory MacKay, RescueTime’s marketing manager. “This means that essentially each time you look at your phone you’ve got a 50/50 chance of setting off a chain reaction of phone check ins.”
4. Your streaming habit means you use 25% more mobile data a month
Well, there had to be some downside to binge-watching all that Queer Eye. Ofcom’s most recent look at digital data usage, its 2019 Communications Market Report, found that, on average, mobile phone users were gobbling up a quarter more data than the previous year, 2.9GB a month. The main reason? “Increased use of subscription video-on-demand services” – up 53% on the previous year.
Since that report was released, our internet time has rocketed, as the Online Nation survey points out. And guess what device we use to do almost all of that internetting? Mobiles – which account for a staggering 81% of time spent online. God knows how many MB of data the nation has spent watching Tiger King. Let’s just say thank goodness for Vodafone’s unlimited data and leave it at that.
5. Why unlimited data deals are great for families
You know that feeling when your work Zoom call’s audio goes so robotic and stuttery it’s like a Daft Punk remix? And on investigation, it turns out that the rest of your household is variously streaming video, online gaming and generally draining so much of your bandwidth that they might as well have attached a tap and be dispensing pints of it in the street?
You’re not alone, according to Shahrum Gilani, CEO of HandsetExpert, a recommendation platform for mobile phone tariffs. He says that some 29.3% of its customers are looking for unlimited mobile data tariffs compared with 14.5% in February.
“As households are doing their learning, communicating, streaming – everything – online, that puts more pressure on the home internet,” says Gilani. “One answer is to have your own separate connection – whether through your phone or a dedicated mobile broadband connection – which means you can do what you need to do without interrupting what the rest of the family does. You can then get on with client calls while another family member is playing Fortnite.” In a pandemic, these are good problems to have.
Staying connected has never been more vital – and it often seems that everyone in the family wants to be online at the same time. That’s where unlimited data comes into its own.
Keep connecting with our unlimited data plans. Switch to unlimited today from £22pm on the UK’s best mobile data network. Switch now
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Best 2019 Mobile Internet Performance vs EE, O2 and Three, based on 35,664 tests on the nPerf app, as of January 2020.
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