Give us our Wi-Fi! US & UK Survey Reveals Consumer Demand for Wi-Fi Services

Seventy eight percent of people in the United States and 74 percent of people in the United Kingdom who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities would be interested in an application that would use Wi-Fi to deliver 'five bars' of coverage at home or in the office.

Eighty eight percent of these people in the US, and 80 percent of people in the UK would also be interested in a service from their mobile operator that would give discounted calling when the phone was connected to Wi-Fi.

It's interesting to see how similar the US and UK numbers are. These numbers are the results of two online surveys conducted in Q2 2010. The surveys were completely independent of each other and were conducted by two different companies. Yet, the level of interest in more Wi-Fi-based services is high across both geographies.

The US survey was done by MarketTools Zoomerang of 330 US smartphone owners. The UK YouGov online omnibus survey focused on the 23% of nearly 2,200 respondents in the United Kingdom with smartphones.

I encourage you to read the full survey overviews for more data and graphics available at Kineto.com.

More highlights:

In the US -

• 43 percent of people who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities use the Wi-Fi every day.
• 45 percent of those people use Wi-Fi because it provides easy access to the Internet, and 43 percent use it because it is faster than the cellular network.

In the UK -

• 50 percent of people who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities use the Wi-Fi every day;
• 40 percent say they use the Wi-Fi because it is faster for accessing the internet; 50 percent say because it is easier.

Smartphone users are embracing Wi-Fi and seem to want to be able to use it more. There's an opportunity for mobile operators to tap into this tremendous interest and encourage Wi-Fi usage to increase network offload, improve network coverage/performance and gain increasing benefits by offloading traffic to the fixed network.

Read all the rest at Kineto.com. And there's plenty more. Then, tell us what you think in the comments.