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The London Olympic Games were eagerly anticipated by the telecom sector; it was the first Olympic Games to be held after 3G networks had matured worldwide, and the popularization of smartphones and tablets.
In many developed countries, smartphones are reaching a 50% penetration rate, and from now on, any hosting country or city of big global events will need to plan its mobile networks for the surge in voice and data traffic.
Huawei commissioned Informa to run a consumer survey in London during the Olympic Games to understand visitors’ mobile service usage and overall satisfaction during the event. The sample size was 889 interviews, split into four groups:
- Londoners not attending the Olympic Games
- Londoners attending the Olympic Games
- U.K. residents attending the Olympic Games
- Non-U.K. residents attending the Olympic Games
Groups one, two and three made up around 20% of the total interviews while group four provided 40% of the total responses.
Even though it was not possible to access the Olympic venues, the interviews were done in the vicinity of the most important areas. These areas were:
- Olympic Park
- Excel Arena
- Wembley Stadium
- Victoria Station
- Earls Court
Survey Results
One of the most striking findings from the survey is the prevalence of smartphones among all four groups surveyed—from 73% to 85% of respondents in each group stated that they use a smartphone. The most “connected” group were the non-U.K. visitors: they had not only the highest smartphone penetration rate, 85%, but also the highest tablet ownership, 17%, and the lowest non-smartphone penetration rate, 17%.
Interestingly, when asked about their usage behavior during the Games, a high percentage of respondents said that they did not change their behavior compared to their usual usage at home. The services that were most mentioned as being more frequently used were sending text/picture messages, browsing the Internet and searching local information, but no more than 36% of respondents declared having used them more than at home. Also, it is worth noting that data-hungry services, like VOIP, watching TV/videos and uploading pictures to websites were not used by a sizable number of interviewees: 33% in the first case, 38% in the second and 41% in the last case.
These figures do not change the fact that more people with mobile data-enabled devices were attending the London Olympics than any of the previous Olympics, so even if many people did not change their behavior while in London, on the aggregate it created a huge amount of data traffic.
Home country operators had limited options to increase revenues with customers visiting London. Free Wi-Fi was the most popular option to connect to the Internet, and acquiring a roaming package with their home operator was the least mentioned option, even though, or maybe because, 52% of non-UK visitors had researched the cost of roaming in the U.K. After Wi-Fi, the second most popular option was the acquisition of a U.K. SIM card: 47% of respondents declared having acquired one.
Another question concerned phone bill expectations. The most concerned were non-U.K. visitors: 52% of them showed concerns about running up a large phone bill during the Games. For all other groups, U.K.-based and London-based, around 74% of respondents were not concerned about it. It can be inferred from this that Britons are well informed about mobile phone costs.
The customer response was very positive in London. It is possible to affirm that the operators and the Olympic Committee did a good job preparing the Olympic Park and the city of London for the increase in traffic during the two weeks of the event. Of the survey respondents, 72% declared they were always able to connect to the Internet; moreover, no less than 85% of respondents said that mobile networks in London, both in terms of coverage and quality, were as good as, or better than, home networks. Again, Wi-Fi proved essential to building the positive perception among users with more than 60% of respondents saying they were able to find Wi-Fi hotspots whenever needed. However, monetizing this interest would have been troublesome, given that only 10% of respondents declared to have paid for Wi-Fi.
Ari Lopes is the principal analyst for Latin America at Informa Telecoms & Media.
