Many of today’s mobile carriers said that they went to limited data plans because users were hogging all the bandwidth while on unlimited data plans. A new report from Consumer Reports says that is not the case, in fact, smartphone data usage is down from what was expected. Smartphone users had to see this coming know what strain was put on networks with unlimited data plans and the use of smartphone rising. Consumer Reports took a look at some 23,000 cell phone bills to get information on the topic.
Some of the things that Consumer Reports found included how much data was actually used between February 2010 and February 2011. Of the three companies looked at, Verizon users had the largest average data usage at 449 MB per month over that year. AT&T was next with around 360 MB of data and T-Mobile cruised in last with 274 MB each month. The numbers, even though they are averages, do not reflect accurate numbers because a small percentage of users us a lot more data than others, bringing the numbers up.
Consumer Reports went on to say that since they could not get an accurate number with the average, they took the median and reported that. The numbers for the same companies were quite a bit lower than before, almost half of what the average was. The median for Verizon dropped to 158 MB, T-Mobile to 48 MB and AT&T with 120 MB per month. These numbers are quite a bit lower and still way lower than what cell phone carriers thought at first. The report really was for showing customers what plan they can stick with and gets the same value with, but maybe for less money per month.
If a customer with Verizon used the unlimited data plan for $30 per month, it actually comes out the same as the customer using the 2GB for $30 a month plan. The report showed that even by the average amount of data usage, a customer would clearly stay under the 2GB mark, without even trying hard to do so. Other companies like AT&T have a 200MB plan for $15 and even those customers would be pretty safe if they used the same data each month. T-Mobile had a plan that was even cheaper for 200MB and users on that network would fair the same way.
