Survey: Verizon smartphone users consume more data than iPhone users

A forthcoming survey from wireless billing company Validas indicates Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ [1]) smartphone users consume more wireless data than AT&T's (NYSE:T [2]), iPhones by a ratio of roughly 1.25 to 1. Average monthly wireless data consumption for Verizon Wireless smartphone users 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," said Ed Finegold, executive vice president-Analytics, for Validas in a statement. "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." More than 11 percent of Verizon Wireless smartphone users fall into this category, versus just 5.6 percent of iPhone users, he added.

Some other interesting tidbits:

• More than 54 percent of Verizon Wireless smartphones consume less than 200 MB per month, versus slightly more than 52 percent of iPhones.
• Nearly 46 percent of Verizon Wireless smartphone users consume more than 200 MB per month, versus nearly 48 percent of iPhones. 
• More than 4 percent of Verizon Wireless smartphone customers 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.

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

It should be interesting to see the data now that AT&T has changed its smartphone data pricing plans to a tiered model.

For more:
- see this Validas release [3]

Related articles:
Verizon adds 1.4M subs in Q2, as reseller customers swarm ranks [4]
Verizon: No immediate plans for tiered data pricing [5]
AT&T's net adds soar with 3.2M iPhone activations [6]
AT&T kills unlimited data pricing, supports iPhone tethering [7]