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.