Less than a year after it first began to be rolled out across the UK, EE has released some seriously interesting stats about how 4G’s affecting the country’s mobile use.

The super fast, mobile internet service – the next generation from 3G – is now available in 95 major towns and cities across the UK, although only about 318,000 are actually utilising the service. The faster speeds were always going to mean changes in the way in which people use their phones, however this early on the statistics already look fairly powerful.

Almost 50% of customers said that they browse the web more on 4G than 3G
This is unsurprising really, it’s not uncommon for the 3G service to become exceptionally slow – sometimes it can feel like dial up – particularly at peak times and in the centre of major cities. With significantly fewer people using 4G the service is undoubtedly more reliable, as well as much quicker.

More than one in three said that they download apps, use GPS services and access social media more
Once again, speed and reliability is a key issue here, GPS services are a great function of mobile phones, but if you cannot actually download the map image they become useless. Similarly with social media, photos are becoming much more of a common feature and with sites like Pinterest and Instagram entirely devoted to images, download speed is a key factor.

Downloading apps via a mobile internet connection is perhaps one of the more surprising stats. Yet again, speed is the key factor, but the increase in download limits is also clearly having an influence on how mobile internet is used.

Two in three use their 4G service for at least an hour a day and 23% admit that they are online via their 4G mobile devices for more than three hours a day.

It’s also having an impact on the use of wi-fi, with almost a quarter finding themselves using their home broadband less and 43% using fewer or no public Wi-Fi hotspots.

Fotis Karonis, chief technology officer at EE said, “A large proportion of activity on our 3G network is web browsing, but on 4G customers enjoy traditionally fixed line activities such as shopping, watching movies and catching up with TV on their mobiles.”

“What is really interesting is that with 4G upload speeds five times faster than home broadband, we are seeing social media use becoming more mobile and transforming faster than had been imagined.”

It’s all great news for those developing mobile apps which rely heavily on the internet. As one aspect of an app that is outside of a developers control, issues with slow connections can be a burden and cause apps to received unnecessarily critical reviews. As 4G continues to grow, the use of mobile apps via mobile data connections will grow, and so too will the possibilities!

Image source: Flickr