How the availability of Wi-Fi connections influences the use of mobile devices

Several aspects might influence the way users operate their mobile devices in a mobile context. In this work, we show how the presence or absence of a Wi-Fi connection influences the amount of data traffic generated by mobile devices. Our results show that the probability of users to generate data traffic while connected to Wi-Fi is twice as high as when a cellular connection only is available. Furthermore, we observe that an almost constant amount of data traffic is generated over a day, although it slightly increases in the late afternoon. Last but not least, we observe that fair-use policies do not seem to influence the behavior of mobile users with respect to the amount of traffic they generate over different weeks of a month. We ground our analysis on the Device Analyzers data set, which contains detailed records of mobile phone usage of more than 17,000 users from all over the world. Building upon these preliminary quantitative results, we outline how the availability of data for mobile users can be improved by combining mobility and phone usage prediction with knowledge about the temporal and spatial availability of Wi-Fi connections.