Citizens greet more and more people on the Internet – calls and text messages are sent less and less frequently

Changing mobile phone usage habits on a daily basis, but especially on vacation, is mainly influenced by the growing popularity of different communication platforms and applications. More and more often, instead of congratulating relatives, friends and acquaintances on Christmas Day and New Year's Eve, by calling or sending a traditional text message, Latvians prefer communication platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Viber, Skype and others.

If, in December 2017, a mobile phone user used 4.5 GB on the BITES network, this amount almost doubled this year to 8.2 MB. With this amount of data, a mobile phone user visits an average of 2,000 websites per month, receives or sends 1,000 good quality average photos, downloads 500 songs or two movies, and 32 hours of streaming music.

"The celebration is the moment that illustrates the latest trends in mobile phone use. We are currently seeing that the use of the Internet on mobile devices is experiencing a major breakthrough: at the beginning of the year, or in the first hour of midnight, a fifth client of BITE was online. Together, they spent nearly 10 TB of the Internet. As usual, the most important data flow was observed in Riga. However, a significant amount of mobile Internet consumption has been recorded in the regions of Riga, Zemgale and Kurzeme ", informs the director of BIT B, Kaspars Buls.

Most of the total Internet traffic on mobile phones, 62%, consisted of online videos as well as streaming audio files with dedicated applications such as "Youtube", "Facebook" "," Spotify ", etc. At that time, about 20% of the total Internet traffic on mobile phones was called instant messaging – matching and calling in mobile applications. This shows that the mobile phone will be mainly used for entertainment and reciprocal communication.

At the same time, the number of calls made and messages sent during holidays on the BITE network decreases each year. For example, if the total length of calls made on the network of the mobile operator on December 24 and 25, 2017 was 7.3 million minutes, it would have risen to 6 million minutes at the Christmas Eve 2017. Last year, however, while there were traditionally more text messages than Christmas, almost the same number of short messages were sent as at Christmas – 2.6 million, compared with 5 million in 2017.

"Given the experience gained and the speed with which mobile technologies are developing, it is clear that the role of smartphones in our daily lives will continue to grow, as will the consumption of mobile Internet. However, I am confident that, in the near future, we will not completely abandon our calls and our text messaging, "is the head of a mobile phone operator.