Casting doubts on the viability of WiFi offloading

With the advent of the smartphone, mobile data usage has exploded which in turn has created tremendous pressure on cellular data networks. A promising candidate to reduce the impact of cellular data growth is WiFi offloading. However, recent data from our study of two hundred student smartphone users casts doubts on the reductions that can be gained from WiFi offloading. Despite the users operating in a dense university WiFi environment, cellular consumption still dominated overall data usage. We believe the root cause of lesser WiFi utilization can be traced to the WiFi being optimized for laptop WiFi reception rather than the more constrained smartphone WiFi reception. Our work examines the relationship of WiFi versus 3G usage through a variety of aspects including active phone usage, application types, and traffic volume over an eight week period from the Spring of 2012.