Classic phone call experienced a real renaissance in Germany
2020 was an exceptional year. The corona pandemic has changed the world forever. The new circumstances also led to extraordinary developments on the Internet. Vodafone wanted to know if and how people kept in contact with their loved ones despite Corona and Lockdown. An analysis of the network load shows: Germany calls longer again. phone call duration germany
The classic phone call experienced a real renaissance. Vodafone customers made calls with their smartphones more than 28 billion times. Particularly noticeable: the individual discussions in 2020 were significantly longer than in previous years. On average, a phone call lasted 3 minutes and 20 seconds. That’s an impressive 35 seconds more than in 2019, when the conversations lasted an average of 2 minutes and 45 seconds. There were similar values in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Messenger services, Voice memos and the like caused the number of calls to stagnate in recent years. So now for the first time in many years there has been a significant increase. The same trend can also be seen in telephone calls in the fixed network: The calls lasted an average of 4 minutes and 30 seconds in 2020 – and thus half a minute longer than in 2019.
Telephone contact with friends and work colleagues
“In 2020, people made more calls on the phone again, and above all for longer, in order to keep in touch with friends and to exchange ideas with work colleagues,” explains Gerhard Mack, Head of Technology at Vodafone Germany. If you add up the talk time of all phone calls made in the Vodafone mobile network, you get an unbelievable duration of 176,000 years. That is almost 20 percent more than in 2019.
Data increase on the Internet at home phone call duration germany
The analysis of the Vodafone networks also showed: Home office, homeschooling and the like caused a data explosion, especially in the fixed network. The amount of data in the fixed network has grown slightly in recent years, mostly by around 20%. Video telephony, streaming services and TV evenings with the family led to an unprecedented record in 2020. The data traffic in the Vodafone cable fiber optic network increased by a whopping 30 percent compared to 2019. A total of 11 exabytes of data – that’s 11,000,000,000 gigabytes – rushed through the Vodafone cable fiber-optic network. For comparison: With this amount of data you could fill the storage space of 22 million iPhones. If you were to stack all of these smartphones, the tower would rise almost 3,200 kilometers. It is also noticeable that people used their time at home significantly more often than in 2019 to stream TV content from media libraries: this saw an increase of more than 30 percent.
New everyday life: people are already online in the morning
The network analysis by Vodafone showed another special feature that can be explained by the corona pandemic and its consequences. “The daily use of data shows that people are changing their everyday lives. In the past, data usage in the fixed network went up on time in the afternoons when people came home from work. In 2020, the data curve rose early in the morning when millions of people started working from home, ”explains Gerhard Mack.
The 5G network continues to grow phone call duration germany
The new 5G cellular standard guarantees fast Internet usage – even with large amounts of data. In 2020, Vodafone made the new 5G network available to 16 million German citizens. In 2021, the telecommunications group will tie in here and make the new mobile communications standard available to more than 30 million people. More than 5,000 5G antennas are currently broadcasting in 800 cities and municipalities in Germany. 5G not only helps to get faster internet, it also helps to save energy. A 5G antenna needs three times less power to transmit data than an LTE antenna and even 40 times less power than a UMTS antenna (3G).
