Smartphone is increasingly dominant in internet access

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In any stratification of Datafolha’s national survey on Brazilian consumption and digital behavior, the smartphone appears as the most used device to access the internet.

The domain is, of course, total among young people between 16 and 24: 97% of them have a smartphone — and the same percentage use it to access the internet. In the general average of the population, the percentages are 88% and 84%, respectively.

Smartphone presence is decreasing by three percentage points with each step of the age group; reaches 94% among people aged 25 to 34, 91% from 35 to 44, and 88% from 45 to 59. The drop is only more abrupt in the last group, of people over 60 years old, in which a total of 72 %.

A similar movement is repeated in the stratification by social class: 97% of those who have a smartphone are from classes A/B, 91% from class C and 76% from D/E. That is, at the base of the social pyramid, one in four surveyed does not have a cell phone that accesses the internet.

“We have observed year after year the growth in the proportion of users who access the network exclusively by cell phone”, says Fábio Storino, coordinator of the ICT Households survey, developed since 2005 by Cetic-Br, an organization linked to the Internet Management Committee in Brazil. .

In the 2014 edition of ICT, the desktop computer was responsible for 80% of accesses to the network, and the cell phone, for 76%. The following year, the smartphone took the lead, while the computer’s role began to collapse. In the latest survey, for 2021 but completed last June, it accounts for 36% of accesses in the 23,950 households surveyed.

For Storino, one of the reasons for the growth of the smartphone was the expansion of the offer of more popular plans. Between 2015 and 2021, ICT portrayed a gradual reduction in the proportion of prepaid, which fell from 75% to 65%. “But these plans are still not very accessible to the poorest sections of the population, which often see the data allowance run out before the end of the month,” she says.

On Datafolha, the average number of respondents who said they had a data package was 70%. The difference in purchasing power causes a gap of 19 percentage points between the richest and the poorest: in classes A/B, 83% have it, in C, 71% and in classes D/E, 54%.

The value of the data package follows the same dynamics: 23% pay up to R$30, 33% of respondents spend from R$30 to R$50, 32%, from R$50 to R$100; only 7% have packages over R$100.

Third Age

The price, compared to devices such as notebooks or tablets, and the ease of using a device that works as a pocket computer are requirements that favor smartphone consumption, but the device still poses difficulties for users aged 60 and over, the range age that least adheres to the device.

To help seniors, institutions such as USP Leste and its branch in São Carlos, which houses the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, offer special courses.

“We have had the Elderly Online course since 2009. At first it was aimed at desktop computers, but, at the request of the students themselves, around 2016, 2017, we started working with smartphones”, says Lilian Cliquet, master in gerontology at USP Leste is specialized in digital literacy for the elderly. “It was even calmer, because the students themselves brought their equipment.”

The university offers courses at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. There are 15 weekly two-hour classes per meeting. “In the initial phase, many arrived with the equipment in the box, they wanted to know how to connect it. We had to explain everything, what an icon was, how a touch screen works, really basic”, says Cliquet.

The lack of patience of family members to teach how to use it is one of the reasons given by the elderly who seek the course, says the teacher. “At home, everyone does it for the elderly, they take their cell phone and solve it, but they want and have the capacity to learn.”

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