Smartphone, tablet data use: Mobile versus Wi-Fi
A new data usage report from Mobidia Technologies in Africa revealed that the telecommunications industry is grossly underestimating the extent of Wi-Fi usage in South Africa.
The report is based on research which analysed statistics derived directly from thousands of smartphones and tablets across the mobile operators.
The main finding of the research was that Wi-Fi data usage exceeds that of mobile by three times.
Christopher Geerdts, sales director for Mobidia Technologies in Africa, said that the result of this under-estimation of Wi-Fi was “a massive under-investment in an opportunity which is growing undetected”.
According to Geerdts, local operators and vendors were usually making estimates largely based on Mobidia’s published statistics from other countries.
“Even though these statistics are drawn from dozens of countries, and millions of devices, there has always been an assumption that the Wi-Fi portion of total usage in South Africa was lower than global benchmarks,” said Geerdts.
“Business analysts believed that countries in Europe, Asia, and North America had more advanced Wi-Fi usage patterns, and so these analysts were estimating a very conservative split of around 50-55% traffic ascribed to Wi-Fi, rather than the 75% now recorded by Mobidia.”
He said that this large under-estimation had resulted in an under-investment into the commercial hotspot opportunity, leaving two main operators – Telkom and Always On – and one large vendor (Cisco) to ride the wave of uptake.
“The statistics confirm that customers use private networks – home and work Wi-Fi points – for most of their data downloads,” said Geerdts.
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