telecommunications
Corona high over: phone calls don’t take that long anymore
A woman is on the phone using her smartphone. Photo: Lino Mirgeler / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Meeting family celebrations and friends – that was taboo for a long time at the height of the corona pandemic. The phone was close at hand. But now people are keeping things short again.
After the German citizens telephoned significantly longer in the first Corona year than before, something is now returning to normal.
In August and September, a mobile phone call in the O2 network lasted on average about 2 minutes and 40 seconds, the network operator Telefónica announced on request.
In the various lockdown months since the beginning of the pandemic, however, the participants were 30 to 60 seconds longer on the phone, as the figures show. Reason for this: Because of the Corona restrictions, citizens were less on the go and no longer met friends or family on site, but rather spoke on the phone – so the need to talk was greater than before. There was a similar development at Vodafone.
A comparison to pre-Corona times: At Telefónica, a cell phone call lasted an average of 2 minutes and 28 seconds in 2019 as a whole – so you are not far from this level. In 2020, cell phone calls lasted 2 minutes and 51 minutes, and in the first three quarters of this year, 2 minutes and 54 seconds. The fact that calls were made longer this year on average than in 2020 is due to the lockdown months at the beginning of 2021 – at that time the demand was very high, but it weakened significantly over the course of the year.
The telecommunications industry association VATM recently presented a study that also looked at conversational behavior. According to the analysis, this year there are an estimated 963 million call minutes per day in Germany. The voice connection minutes include landline and mobile phone calls as well as calls via Internet communication services such as Whatsapp and Skype. Compared to the previous year, according to the study, there is an increase of four percent in call minutes. That is significantly weaker growth than in 2020: In the first Corona year there was an increase of 16 percent.