October 14, 2019

Ofcom says that its research on how people use their mobile phone sheds new light on people’s experiences of making calls and getting online on the move.

Ofcom’s Mobile Matters report analyses how around 150,000 people used their Android phone between 1 January and 31 March 2019, helping Ofcom to understand mobile users’ changing needs.

The research compared how long people in ten major UK cities spend on conversations from their mobile. Liverpudlians came top, spending almost seven minutes on the average call, more than 40% longer than Londoners, who came second, and twice as long as people in Bradford, who had the shortest conversations.

Other findings show that a quarter of people made less than five mobile calls a month, with 6% of people not making any standard mobile calls at all.

The research highlights that people spend most of their time online connected to Wi-Fi (69%), rather than using 3G or 4G. This helps explain why more than half of us (60%) use less than 1 gigabit (GB) of mobile data a month, and only one in ten (10%) use 5GB or more.

Ofcom has also published a new online guide offering help and advice for people who struggle for mobile reception at home. To read Ofcom’s news release in full and for a link to the research, click here.