Ed Finegold, Validas: Verizon Wireless Smartphones Consume More Data Than iPhones

July 29, 2010

An ongoing study of wireless data utilization shows that Verizon Wireless Smartphones are consuming more wireless data than AT&T iPhones by a ratio of roughly 1.25:1. Average monthly wireless data consumption for Verizon Wireless Smartphones is 421 megabytes per month, versus 338 megabytes per month for iPhones.

"Averages can be misleading because when you plot data users in a distribution, you quickly see that there is no typical user – they are spread across a broad range," says Ed Finegold, Executive Vice President-Analytics, for Validas. "The key detail in this study that drives the average is that, by percentage, nearly twice as many Verizon Wireless Smartphone users are consuming 500 megabytes to 1 gigabyte per month compared to AT&T iPhone users," Finegold says. More than 11 percent of VZW Smartphone users fall into this category, versus just 5.6 percent of iPhone users.

Validas also finds that slightly more than 54 percent of VZW Smartphones consume less than 200 MB per month, versus slightly more than 52 percent of iPhones. Nearly 46 percent of VZW Smartphones consume more than 200 MB per month, versus nearly 48 percent of iPhones. But, more than 4 percent of VZW Smartphones consume more than 2 gigabytes per month, as opposed to just 1.6 percent of iPhones. Only 2/10ths of 1 percent of both VZW Smartphones and iPhones use more than 5 GBs per month. Further, a nearly even percentage of users consume no data at all in a given month – 3.4 percent for Verizon Wireless Smartphones versus 2.9 percent for AT&T iPhones.

The data for this analysis was derived from more than 20,000 consumer wireless bills dated between January and May of 2010. "Smartphones" deliberately excludes BlackBerry devices which, due to data compression techniques, do not follow similar data consumption patterns to those of iPhones and other Smartphones.