Now that it's February, it means that 2025 is in full effect, and 2024 is behind us. It's the perfect time to take a look back at last year and see what was going on in terms of trends in the technology space.
Verizon has a massive platform, and it has used the data it has access to to prepare the Consumer Connections Report for 2024. This will give us a good look into connectivity trends, daily experiences involving tech, other data regarding home gadgets, and more. Let's dive into the report and explore the things that the carrier has found out.
Verizon's Doing Its Best to Keep Children Safe, Yet Connected
The internet is an amazing thing, but there's as much good as there is bad over there. It's hard to keep children away from the internet entirely, but there are moves you can make to protect them.
Verizon's Gizmo smartwatch can keep your children connected to you, allowing for calls and texts, but only from approved contacts. Verizon was able to show that caregivers made an average of 3.3 million calls to Gizmo Watch wearers, and caregivers started 30% of all calls. That's not bad at all.
Verizon Family makes it easy to set parental control on smartphones, and by using that, we're able to see that parents are most concerned about Tumblr, Whisper, and Snapchat. In fact, 54% of parents are using Verizon Family filters to keep their children away from social media. Even higher, though, is that 62% use filters to block out objectionable content.
Households Are Using More and More Data Each Month
Verizon offers its Home Internet service for those who want to stay connected at home, and in the United States, it was able to find that households subscribed to the service used an average of 656GB of data every month. That's a lot and is 6% more than the same statistic in 2023.
Perhaps the popularity of other connected devices in the home plays a role in increasing data usage. The average house using Verizon Internet has 18 different devices connected to the internet. That's a lot.
As much as 45% of American internet households have at least one smart home device, like a video doorbell or a smart thermostat. To expand on that, it was found that 20% of US households connected to the internet own a smart video doorbell, like a Ring. A smaller percentage—16%—own a smart thermostat.
Online Shopping Is Fun, But Only Sometimes
We can all appreciate the convenience of shopping online. After all, 23% of Verizon's customer purchases were made online. That's essentially a full quarter. However, a massive 62% of customers chose to make their purchases in Verizon's brick-and-mortar stores, especially when upgrading their smartphones.
Generally speaking, younger customers prefer to shop online, while older customers like the traditional experience of shopping in retail. That's not surprising, though.
Verizon's Metrics on Network Usage at Football Games Is Interesting
There's a lot of data used at football games. You could be sending videos and pictures to social media, calling friends and family to keep them updated, or checking the scores from other teams. It doesn't matter. Verizon found that nearly 1 petabyte (960 TB, to be exact) of data was used across NFL stadiums in the 2024/2025 season, and video accounted for a quarter of that.
