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Cell phone users in front of cell phone mast
Photo: Julian Stratenschulte / DPA
The corona crisis has meant that people have been on the phone significantly longer than before.
In the past year, a cellular connection lasted an average of three minutes and 20 seconds and thus 35 seconds longer than in 2019, as Vodafone announced on request.
In the previous years, however, the duration of average cell phone calls had remained more or less constant.
There was a similar development at the competitor Telefónica (O2), where the average mobile phone call in the first Corona year lasted three minutes and thus half a minute longer than in 2019.
During the Corona shutdowns in spring and December, Telefónica even reported a call duration of four minutes.
The third mobile network operator, Deutsche Telekom, did not provide any information.
Keep in touch with friends
The pandemic also had an impact on landline usage, with Vodafone calling these lines in 2020 for four and a half minutes, 30 seconds longer than before.
Vodafone chief technology officer Gerhard Mack says, referring to the figures: "In 2020, people made more and more calls on the phone again in order to keep in touch with friends and to exchange ideas with colleagues." The number of mobile phone calls rose at Vodafone by almost a billion to 28 billion, the number of landline calls remained roughly the same at a good three billion.
Vodafone has also published data on internet usage in Germany.
In the fixed network, the Düsseldorf company came to eleven exabytes of data (eleven billion gigabytes) last year, which corresponds to an increase of a good 30 percent.
In previous years, the data growth was only around 20 percent.
Lots of traffic from streaming services
The corona restrictions, including closed cinemas and pubs, are likely to have resulted in people being more at home and more online.
"Most of the data rushed through the network in the evening because the good old movie night with the family was back in fashion and because we met our friends more often in video chat instead of in the pub or at home," said Vodafone manager Mack.
With Internet connections via the mobile network, the data volume at Vodafone rose by 40 percent - in previous years it had been 50 percent.
The company explains the small increase by the fact that people were less on the move in pandemic times and therefore used the W-LAN at home more often instead of the mobile data on their cell phones.
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