Almost one in five home broadband subscribers in the US (19%) upgraded their subscription to a higher speed since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a survey by Deloitte fund. Eight percent of subscribers changed ISP, most often due to unreliable connections or poor Wi-Fi coverage with their previous provider.
Around 70 percent of consumers said their home Wi-Fi met their needs for range and speed, but more have tried to fix dropouts and dead spots by extending their home networks. During the pandemic, 30 percent of home internet users purchased Wi-Fi extenders, 19 percent bought mobile hotspots, and 14 percent added mesh Wi-Fi networks, according to the study.
The survey also looked at mobile behaviour, which seems to have been less directly affected by the pandemic. Close to 40 percent of households with mobile data plans made some change to their mobile data plan since the start of the crisis. Upgrading to a new phone was the highest driver for this, followed by switching to an unlimited data plan and adding 5G.
Among respondents planning to switch mobile providers in the next year, the most common reason is to get 5G service, followed closely by getting better value for the price.
This is the second edition of Deloitte's Connectivity and Mobile Trends survey and was conducted in March among over 2,000 US consumers. It found that 55 percent of US households still have at least one person working from home and 43 percent have someone home-schooling. Over a quarter of home workers (28%) and nearly a third of home schoolers (32%) reported that they struggled to connect to the internet from certain locations in their home.
