Just 1 percent of mobile users account for half of all data traffic

Consumer Reports News: January 06, 2012 02:08 PM

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Only 1 percent of all mobile subscribers are guilty of gobbling up 50 percent of the world's bandwidth, according to a new report by the British company Arieso, which advises mobile operators in Africa, Europe and the U.S.

Those hungry data users were, for the most part, predominantly using USB devices or 3G modems, and streaming media, such as movies, could probably be pointed to as the probable activity eating up so much bandwidth.

Arieso's study tracked 1.1 million mobile customers of a European operator during a 24-hour period in November.

The study, compared data usage across a variety of connected devices, and also found that iPhone 4S users demand three times as much data as iPhone 3G users, and twice as much as iPhone 4 users.

In addition, Arieso found that the gap is growing between the 1 percent of extreme data users and the rest of us. In 2009, the top 3 percent of users generated 40 percent of network traffic, and now those same users account for 70 percent of traffic.

In a press release, study author and Arieso CTO Michael Flanagan stated, "The introduction of increasingly sophisticated devices, coupled with growing consumer demand, is creating unrelenting pressure on mobile networks. The capacity crunch is still a very real threat for mobile operators, and it looks set to only get harder in 2012."

Arieso reveals latest trends in smartphone data use [Arieso]
Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World's Bandwidth, and Gap Is Growing [New York Times]

—Maggie Shader