In the era of Covid and gods lockdownthe browsing habits of Italians have changed both for “quality” [dei siti visitati] that for “quantity” [del tempo trascorso in rete]. For example, the various lockdowns have greatly benefited the e-commerce sector, given the impossibility of leaving the house and therefore making purchases live.
According to the findings of Agcom, data traffic has been steadily increasing since the outbreak of the epidemic in March 2020. Some peak situations have been recorded at regular intervals; in the first phase, for example, many Italians were looking for information on the progress of the emergency and on the content of the various government decrees, which made the curve sharpen; from the second half of last year onwards, however, the peaks were mainly related to use of streaming content and especially football matches on weekends.
As the tightening measures eased, the growth figure remained strangely unchanged. This means that Covid has inexorably changed the habits of Italians, who make an increasingly intensive use of the internet and continue to prefer “online” services to “offline” ones (see for example the aforementioned case of e-commerce) .
On the other hand, with regard to the “quantity” of consumption, the fixed network and the mobile network have evolved in parallel: on the one hand, growth of approximately 220 thousand units on an annual basis; on the other hand, the consumption of Giga in 2021 increased by 33% compared to the previous year.
Speaking of the fixed network, the report also mentions an increase in accesses with technologies that allow advanced performance (FTTC lines, FTTH lines and even FWA lines). At the end of 2021, the overall broadband lines were close to quota 18.7 million. For each broadband line, there was an increase in consumption of 14.9% (compared to 2020) and 67.3% (compared to 2019).
As mentioned, the use of mobile broadband has also grown exponentially: the average daily unit consumption per SIM is approximately 0.35GB33% more than in 2020.
