China has used 49.3 million GB of mobile data in the week since lunar new year

Home is where the heart is: that’s an idiom that rings as true in China as it does anywhere, and it’s the reason why millions and millions of urban Chinese trek their way out into the countryside each Spring Festival to visit their parents. But for many Chinese, home isn’t where the wifi is. And that means increased use of mobile data.

In fact, according to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), in the week since the lunar new year began Chinese have consumed more than 49.3 million gigabytes of mobile data. That works out to an average daily data usage of 54.8 megabytes per person. That may not sound like a lot, but Chinese mobile users are habitually pretty conservative with their data usage, and it’s actually 50 percent more data than is used on average during a normal day.

Why the sudden data explosion? The lack of wifi in many rural Chinese homes is one reason. And of course, virtually no one works over the week that follows the lunar new year, so mobile users have more free time than usual to fiddle with their phones. Of course, the red envelope craziness also plays a role. Giveaways on WeChat and Weibo had users glued to their phones during the new year festivities, and consequently data usage on the eve of the holiday totaled more than 7.2 million GB, up 69.5 percent compared to last year.

See: WeChat users sent each other 1 billion cash-filled red envelopes over lunar new year

(Source: Techweb)