Ericsson Consumer Lab has released a report on smartphone behaviour in India that assesses the impact of growth in smartphones and applications usage on creating new user habits and expectations about mobile broadband performance.
The Ericsson Consumer Lab study was carried out in April-June 2014 among 4,000 smartphone users across 18 urban cities in India. It is based on a combination of a consumer perception survey with on-device measurements, which helps understand mobile broadband performance in terms of user satisfaction and needs, changes in behaviour, application usage, data consumption and key metrics that drive network performance.
The report assesses that over the last two years, there has been a 63 per cent increase in applications usage and 20 per cent increase in terms of time spent on smartphones. On an average, Indian consumers spend over three hours a day on their smartphones and 25 per cent consumers check their phones over 100 times a day. Around one-third of the time spent on smartphones is for using applications and this trend is expected to continue.
The report further states that the social and messaging application are the primary reason for most new users to buy a smartphone. However, 40 per cent of the mature smartphone users say that their usage is no longer limited to social networking activities. About 24 per cent of the total smartphone owners use mobile applications such as WhatsApp and WeChat for business purposes to sell products and services, and for expanding their reach to new customers. The study further estimates that without the availability of Wi-Fi or fixed broadband connectivity at home, eight in 10 smartphone users will continue to access mobile internet using mobile broadband.
The study also revealed that there is a discrepancy between smartphone users? expectations and their actual experiences. Consumers indicate that indoor coverage, speed and network availability are very important, but half of all issues encountered today by mobile broadband users are faced indoors and 44 per cent of the time a mobile broadband user does not have access to the network. The study concludes that going forward, as consumers increase their smartphone usage, their expectations and demands from networks around coverage and network speeds will continue to grow.
