Mobile phones are essential items for millions of people across the UK. Whether it’s for work, keeping in touch with family or shopping online, staying connected has never mattered more – particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To better understand the changing ways in which people use their mobile services, and the experience they receive, Ofcom has analysed crowdsourced data collected between January and April 2020 from around 200,000 Android devices1 across the UK.

In this report, we focus on the share of connections across wireless network technologies (2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi), the success rate for mobile connections, response times and patterns in the ways people use their mobile phones. We also look at how these vary by factors such as location, day of the week and time of day.

In March, the UK entered a period of ‘lockdown’ in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This had a substantial impact on our use of mobile communications services, as people became more reliant on smartphones and other devices to stay in touch with friends and family, work from home and keep up to date with the latest news. To look more closely at this change, we compared use pre-lockdown (1 January to 22 March) and post-lockdown (23 March to 30 April). For certain performance metrics – success rate for mobile connections and response times – we compared the pre-lockdown averages with figures from last year’s report to see if there had been significant year-on-year changes. Due to changes in the panel, we are unable to make year-on-year comparisons for other metrics which rely on user behaviour.