“In an ‘always on’ society, people expect to be connected everywhere,” a new Ofcom report simply notes. And that, in the end, is the primary and enduring value of mobile internet connectivity.
“We know from our mobile research, which looks at information on data service availability, that while at home, for 76 percent of the time Android users with access to 4G mobile technologies were using apps, they were connected to WiFi,” Ofcom says. “In contrast, while away from home, almost 65 percent of app usage time on Android smartphones was through a mobile network.”
It is worth asking the question of how behavior could change if 5G brings mobile network speeds faster than fixed connections, and if tariffs are changed to eliminate the difference between the cost of using a fixed or mobile internet access location. Logic suggests consumers might simply stay connected to the mobile network, in such cases.
One might note that there already are differences in network connection preferences among device users in both the United States and United Kingdom, as comScore noted in 2012.
Other studies done in 2017 likewise suggest that users who do not have to worry about their data usage (unlimited plans) use far more data on the mobile network.
That is a major behavioral trend we must be alert to discern.
The other obvious point is that smartphones are used by people (as are smartwatches or fitness trackers), where other internet-connected devices are used by households (TVs, game consoles, PCs), although in single-person households there is an identity between “per person” and “per household” use of such appliances.
It also is worth noting that, in terms of ubiquity of usage, only two devices--the smartphone and the TV--are in most homes. That explains the high interest mobile service providers have in video streaming: phones and TVs are the two ubiquitous devices, because the services those devices support are ubiquitous.
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