Surprisingly, India spent less time connecting to Wi-Fi in March 2020: Opensignal

It would be an obvious perception that there would be a substantial increase in the consumption of the internet through cellular data or Wi-Fi during India’s 21-day lockdown period. Defying this notion, mobile analytics company, Opensignal released its findings on an analysis of the average amount of smartphone users’ time spent connected to Wi-Fi across many regions and countries, including India.

Surprisingly, the analysis showed that in contrast to many other countries, Opensignal did not detect a statistically significant week-on-week increase in the percentage of time Indian smartphone users have spent on Wi-Fi between the second week of January 2020 and the third week of March 2020. In other Asian countries too, Opensignal did not see a significant increase in this period including Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam.

Whereas, the time on Wi-Fi increased significantly on a week-on-week basis in the third week of March in many countries in Northern America and Europe, as well as in Australia, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil. Opensignal also detected significant increases in Time on Wi-Fi, in either or both the second and third weeks of March in Australia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. And, Thailand showed the first signs of a rise in Time on Wi-Fi in Thailand.

With regards to India, Opensignal’s findings on Time on Wi-Fi is an indication that the demand for internet over cellular data is predominant over Wi-Fi.

Opensignal brought out this analysis given the interest in telecommunications created by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and the restrictions on the movement of people that have been introduced to reduce its spread.