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Average Cellphone Data Usage Is 145.8 MB Per Month
destinyland writes "For the first time, the majority of cell phones are accessing data services — 53 percent, compared to only 42 percent last year, according to a new study by Validas. And each user downloads an average of 145.8 MB per month (the average was just 96.8 MB per month in 2009). The heaviest users are Verizon smartphone owners, averaging 428 MB per month (338 MB on average for iPhone users). In fact, Verizon users were twice as likely as iPhone users to exceed both 500 MB and 2 GB each month."
This just supports my frustrations towards AT&T
that Verizon outpaces AT&T in this stat. I think the theoretical limit for downloading data from AT&T's network asymptotes at 200 MB/month.
I clicked on the article and couldn't find any mention of standard deviation. Knowing the standard deviation would make statistics like this far more interesting and meaningful.
This survey only covers billed 2G/3G data. As an iPhone owner, I know the data I user per month on AT&T networks has declined recently as AT&T wi-fi hotspots seem to be proliferating everywhere. From Panera to McDonalds, it seems like most lunch spots have free wi-fi, and my home and work certainly does. I don't know how good Verizon's phones are at dealing with wi-fi, or whether they include 802.11b/g/n like the iPhone. In addition, as apps are often more efficient than sites at communicating over the network, some of the reduction is almost certainly due to "there's an app for that" reduction.
In short, I really don't think the MB/month over 2G/3G is necessarily indicative of how much internet is used on a phone anymore.
E pluribus unum
That's on average less then 5MB per day. If I read a few 400 comment threads on slashdot or fark I already have to download that much html. What are these people doing with their phones?
My cell data usage is ~3GB for this month. Yea wifi tethering!
The number in the OP includes all the power users and all the non (or minimal) users. A much more useful measurement would be to know how much data an average user uses. Depending on the proportion of power to non users, that could be more or less than this average for all users.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
While good to know that most people don't use that much data over cell connection. But Apple could use it to show that Android phone are so difficult to use that people don't know how to install wifi with it. Or it could be that there are more apps for the iPhone so less need to download web content for UI. Or it could be that more techy people use Android feature. Or it could mean AT&T has bad service in heavy use areas
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is not useful data. The average data usage per month for all cell phone users includes (from the article) the 47% of all cell phone users who are not data users at all. This is like trying to find the average upload & download per month for broadband users by finding out the total bandwidth used by broadband subscribers then dividing it by the entire population of Earth.
Now that we've established your level of mathematical competency, could I interest you in a few lottery tickets?
lol, troll. Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. rofl
Countering your argument, there's pretty much nothing different between any kind of phone. A browser is a browser. An app is an app. More often than not these days, smartphone have an online store. I dunno, more often then not I see people playing games (tetris)... Oh yeah, and most other phones have at least flash lite, so they automatically download more when online. For all Android phones, they have Skyfire which automatically transcodes Flash Video to a format the browser recognizes.
So I wouldn't be surprised if this were actually the case. =P
I have a droid and have full flash, the rest of the droid folks will have it next week.
I didn't see it listed in the article, but around 43% of Verizon users use data, compared to the 71.2% of at&t users that the article did mention. Even with the wifi network at&t may have the bigger burden due to more users.
I'm in the 500M to 1G camp, and I'm on Verizon. The only reason my data usage is so high is because Verizon offered to give me the "mobile hotspot" feature free for life (a little app on my phone that acts as a gateway and gives me a wireless access point which then routes out to 3G). I use it literally every day, on the train, to connect my netbook to the internet.
Without the mobile hotspot, I would probably use less than 100M per month. And hey, they gave it to me free!
Nemilar http://www.techthrob.com - Visit Me!
Since yesterday when I have no internet, I've been using my nexus one to tether. Just browsing the internets on my laptop I've gone over that. Limit is 1GB. let's hope i have the internet installed by then!
With a voice call at ~8 kbps, 140 MB is equivelent to 40 hours of talking on the phone a month. Smartphone data is pretty darn significant in the phone company world.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I think it probably tells you more about AT&T and tethering (or lack thereof). Of course you CAN tether now, but you have to pay through the nose.
I've had an iPhone 3gs for about a year. The most data I've used in any month has been ~850mb, with an average of around 250-300mb.
Most of the time I'm on a wifi network. Some hotels, my workplaces, home, many restaurants, etc. The 850mb was traveling through several states and using the iPhone heavily for mapping, etc.
I would think I would have trouble using 2gb of data in a month on my iPhone unless I turned off my wifi (which would be stupid to do at home and at work) and like..left yourube videos streaming.
...a lot about the usability of the iPhone OS - obviously it offers something fundamentally different in online experience and usability than the other smartphone environments.
Fundamentally different and inferior compared to other Verizon smartphones, you mean?
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
well most people are aware of there data caps and avoid any heavy usage wile on there 3g mode. they will switch to wifi if available and the few times its not use there 3g but it still will give them a pretty low avg usesage. or us there gps using some of there 3g data.
No, it's the popularity of "V-Cast", Verizon's mobile streaming T services. Verizon and Sprint push a huge quantity of data to their smartphone and featurephone users as plain old TV.
Da Blog
I was downloading the torrented facebook files over verizon.
-- Boycott Shell
What is that?
AT&T, no thank you. I've had their service in different forms, and was passed along between them and Cingular for too long.
Verizon, no thank you. After limited use with their terrible computer hijacker called VZ Access Manager, any company with deceptive practices like this are not for me.
TMobile, no thank you. Had them for just over two years. I was never really dissatisfied with the service, but my phone bill was approaching $100/mo toward the end of my contract because I started using my phone a lot more often (was on the $45/mo basic plan).
Sprint, my new provider. I'm sure that, in time, I will stop liking them. For now, however, I am very happy with my service. Unlimited data. Unlimited mobile to mobile voice. My phone works inside my apartment (unlike TMobile), and 4G is supposedly coming to Denver in October (I can connect to 4G now, but it doesn't really work yet).
I honestly don't see the point of getting one of these super cool new "phones" that do everything else, only to be limited by the amount of data you can pass through it. With just four days left of my first billing cycle, I've used 478,100kb.
Of course, not being limited by data limits just means that I'm limited by my battery limits. Though, my netbook functions as a pretty good backup battery.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The really interesting data would be how much data usage has grown over the past 3 years, and even over the past 3 months.
AT&T changed their iPhone data plan from unlimited to 2GB/month. You bet your bippy that AT&T had projections as to when the average consumer would exceed that allotment so that they can begin offering higher tier data plans for more $$$$$$$$$.
I'm doing my bit to push up the average. I used about 55GB last month on a Sprint 3G smartphone plan and think replacing my DSL with using my phone instead was a great decision. It's only $70-$80 a month for such a nice plan, too.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
At a growth rate of 50% per month in a very few years usage will average over terabytes per month and AT&T's extra usage fees will exceed the GNP of the United States. It's a conspiracy I tell you.
Average data use is a meaningless statistic, and I'm sick of seeing people trot out those numbers to justify tiered pricing plans that punish people who use their smartphones for their intended purpose. I think the point of the article, as stated in the title, is that smartphones are here to stay and their usage is only going to grow. A few years ago, few people were interested in browsing the web over an EDGE connection. Now there are zillions of ways to be connected and entertained. Even non-geeks. Wireless carriers should facilitate this. When AT&T dropped their unlimited data plan and introduced tiered pricing, it dropped prices for the light users and added modest costs to heavy users. There's nothing wrong with that, but please let's not imply that using less than 150MB per month is "average," or "normal," or in any other way desirable. If every iPhone user in my region were on Waze, our traffic would be vastly improved. And if they were listening to Pandora or Last.fm they'd all be happier. At least that's where the vast majority of my 2.1GB per month of iPhone data is going. I can't say for sure, because all I get is the metered bill. It would be neat to see it broken down by traffic type.
That bears out what I see when I'm in a city area, which isn't so often these days. Just using my iPhone 3GS sans tethering I'm averaging between 2-5 gigs a month. Last month, however, I had to do everything from the phone (including download of software updates, *and* the iOS 4 firmware)... from the iPhone:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leoofborg/4814198808/
Filer.app (formerly Downloader) & 'Downloads.app' are your friend(s).
--- See you at the Tannhäuser Gate.
Verizon customers have no such cap, only tethered data is capped.
i think no matter how you twist and turn that, the iphone users seem to enjoy "the online" a shitloads more than the other smartphone users. draw your own conclusions.
This is actually quite interesting to see how much data usage differs. I'm a quite normal "nerd" user of a cellular network via mobile phone around 8-10 gigabytes per month, that includes the random mobile phone usage as a laptop modem. I have my own landline at home, so the mobile network is not the only option. But it helps to have a 17 dollars per month plan with unlimited data, no speed limit in a HSPA+ network with good country wide coverage.
After buying my iPhone, I found a number of "features" on it that pissed me right off. Granted, I should have researched more, but I was on a limited time frame.
In any case, I decided I'm not going to pay a dime to the app store. I'm not sending any more money to Apple.
Because of this, I don't have that many apps on it. I browse the 'net a bit, and use Google Maps quite a bit, but other than that I don't really do much. I could pretty much replace the thing with a $30 phone, a GPS navigation system, and a book to read while I'm waiting on my food at truck stops.
My next phone will be an Android (probably second-hand and unlocked, since I doubt AT&T will start selling them any time soon) and I expect my usage will go up quite a bit.
(For those curious, a small sample of my problems with the phone includes the crippled bluetooth, the requirement for itunes to do anything to the phone, the lack of jailbreak ability (this has since been solved, but wasn't when I got the phone), the lack of flash support, and the insane way you have to go about converting mp3s to ringtones, among other nitpicks. All these are related to how Apple wants to control my use of the phone. The killer was when, shortly after I got the phone and had everything set up on it, my one machine with windows on it crashed, and after I reinstalled it insisted I erase my phone in order to resync it. I'm not a violent man, but I came really close to crushing my phone with my truck when that happened.)
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
I've always been told that I was "above" average... ;-)
I am far more interested in seeing more refined details based at least by phone, if not carrier and plan.
After all, does it make a difference if you are on a web-capable phone with an app downloader and a special mobile phone web browser compared to a smartphone with a full web browser and flash 10.1 compatibility? Does it matter if your phone has a 240x80 LCD with a d-pad for navigation, a 2.7" touch screen with ink input and virtual keypad, or a 4.3" touch screen with virtual keypad? Does it matter if you can throw an app like Google Maps on it or use a proprietary navigator that has maps loaded onto the phone? Does it matter if you even signed up for a data plan or not when using a web capable phone? Does it matter if you tether your phone to a laptop or use a Cradlepoint PHS300 to make your tethered phone into a mobile hotspot to share internet in a van on a cross-country trip... maybe streaming Netflix for entertainment?
I think most of us will say yes, it matters. Not all users are equal, and not all data plans result in equal behavior.
So, I say in the least show us by phone so we can see if their is greater usage or equal usage between older "web capable" cellphones and the newest breeds of almost netbook equivalent (in hardware power and software functionality) smartphones.
I can tell you this - my verizon data usage was very high with my Omnia and $30 data plan when I had cable because I used the slingbox mobile player app. Very hand for filling time while waiting for the wife to finish shopping or for the dentist's secretary to call "next". However, I dropped TV so my data usage went down. ;)
Phone platform aside, I wonder if they included or included the bandwidth re-transmitted due to errors on the line? My experience has been that Verizon has significantly higher failure rates per packet than other superior (GSM) networks. You're out in the boonies with Verizon 3G, and you're taking 2-3 times as much bandwidth to actually transmit/receive. In contrast, with t-mobile you either have a connection or you don't.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
At the beginning of June when AT&T's new data plans were announced I was a little miffed as an iPhone owner but curious what my actual usage was. I had gotten used to the idea of "unlimited" data and wondered how close to the 5GB soft cap I was getting. I figured the new 2GB cap for "unlimited" would really screw me over. On June 2nd I reset the data counter on my iPhone and checked it against at the end of the month and reading this story I checked it again. I'm only averaging about 170MB of cellular data a month. If this trend bears out I may go crazy and drop down to the 200MB plan and save myself $60 a year.
I've got WiFi at work and at home so there's a lot of browsing and e-mail checking I do that never goes over the cell network. While I'm out and not around a WiFi connection I tend to browse mobile versions of blogs and new sites. I really appreciate sites adding mobile-friendly stylesheets and such. Even over 3G browsing on a cellular connection is slow going and the full blown versions of even simple pages are between 1-2MB anymore. For instance Engadget's mobile page is only about 300K worth of resources while their normal page is between 1.5-2MB. That's a ridiculous amount of superfluous shit you've got to download to read a web page that's mostly text. It's not just the size of resources but the number of separate files (and therefore separate HTTP connections) that cause problems. Even the fastest 3G has latency of at least a quarter of a second, every separate file is a separate HTTP connection that needs to be negotiated and with everyone using CDNs and advertising affiliates often a dozen or so DNS lookups.
As an aside: if you administer a website please optimize your resources. It's not the most difficult thing in the world and it benefits everyone, not just people with smart phones. I've got a 10Mbps DSL connection and while it's not the fastest connection in the world pages don't load any faster than my 512Kbps connection from ten years ago.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Over here in Norway, I've got a pay-as-you-go phone; zero subscription costs, but I pay for usage. Ignoring voice for the moment, that's at a rate of 10 øre (roughly 0.0165 US dollars) per MB of traffic. There are, of course, no caps; that would be silly.
How does this chalk up to what you get elsewhere?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/01/verizon-mobile-hotspot-on-webos-devices-now-free/
I'm shocked by the fact that you're a Slashdot reader that wasn't aware that Apple would try to control your use of your phone.
That said, AT&T carries a number of pretty decent Android phones now. Check out the Captivate for a very nice one.
The data costs in the US are astounding. Do you have no infrastructure or is this just what the market will bear?