It’s been more than a week that the Indian government announced a nation-wide lockdown to prevent COVID-19 infections. The 21-day lockdown began on March 25th and has changed the way people work and interact with each other. Amidst this, OpenSignal has issued an interesting report revealing statistics of Wifi usage on mobile devices across the country.
Surprisingly, the report suggests no significant increase in Wifi usage across India on mobile in the third week of March. Whereas countries like Australia, Malaysia, and the Philippines all showed increased in Time on Wifi in either or both the second and third weeks of March.
As can be seen on the charts below, the Time on Wifi actually decreases by a small margin when compared to the first and second weeks of January. What is also noteworthy is that India has the lowest percentages on the chart amongst all countries by far. It means that the preferred medium of the majority of smartphone users in India is not broadband or Wifi. It naturally signifies that India relies more on mobile data. The world’s most populated democracy has 687.62 million users, of which a mere 22.26 million has access to the wired broadband.
Our assumption fits well with previous reports from COAI that mobile data has seen a massive 70% uptick since the lockdown began. Now, it is also worth noting that many broadband users have recently slow network speeds by up to 20%; however, the report suggests no increased influx of users.
Besides India, a few other countries such as Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam also did not see a significant increase in Time on Wifi in this period.
