Over the last 12 months, the amount of data the average smartphone user consumes per month has increased 89%, surging to 435 megabytes in the first quarter from
230MB a year ago. Data usage for the top 10% of smartphone users is up 109% while the top 1%, it's up a whopping 155%, according to new Nielsen data.According to the company's monthly analysis of more than 65,000 lines, smartphone owners—especially people with iPhones and Android devices—are consuming more data than ever on
a per-user basis. "This has huge implications for carriers since the proportion of smartphone owners is also increasing dramatically," states a Nielsen blog post today, which also points out 37% of U.S. mobile subscribers have smartphones.
iPhones and Android users are the heaviest data consumers, at 492 and 582 MBs on average per month, respectively. Windows Phone 7 users, though much fewer in number, have doubled their data
use over the last two quarters to 317 MB, possibly driven by the expanded number of apps available.
Even as data usage has almost doubled, most mobile
subscribers are paying around what they did a year ago for data. That translates to a lower cost per unit of data consumed. The amount the typical smartphone user pays per unit of data has
dropped by nearly 50% in the last year, from 14 cents to 8 cents per megabyte (MB).