Smartphone users are not using that much data yet reports Nielsen Research. Nielsen surveyed 60,000 mobile customers' phone bills to find that only a small percentile use ginormous data and the top 6 percent of smartphone users are consuming half of all data.
Average data consumption increased from about 90MB per month during
the first quarter of 2009 to 298MB per month during the first quarter of 2010. This represents a year-over-year increase of approximately 230 percent.
While this increase is substantial, in the first quarter of
2009 more than a third of smartphone subscribers used less than 1MB of data per month; this number has dropped to a quarter in the first quarter of 2010 as the number of applications and the utility of smart devices has increased substantially. That means about 20 million current smartphone users are hardly using data.
Nielsen Contends
Usage-based pricing may be more fair. The top 6 percent of smart phone users are consuming half of all data. The vast majority of customers, 99 percent are better off with a pricing a data pricing model than under flat-rate pricing where they are paying for much more than they ever use.
There is a growing need to educate smartphone users. With about 23 percent smartphone penetration in the United States, we are still in the early adopter phase. A quarter of these early adopters are not using their device for data services at all.
More than a third of smartphone users have not yet signed up for a data plan, mostly the ones who got the smartphones before mandatory data plans. Eventually they will get converted into paying customers for data, but it is critical for the long term success of the industry to not only collect revenue but to also provide and convey value