Nielsen report shows a 155% increase in smartphone data usage by the heaviest data hounds

The latest Nielsen report on smartphone usage reveals some interesting statistics about data consumption. Smartphone data usage has increased 89% year over year. The top 1% of  data users increased their consumption by 155%. That means if on average the heaviest users of the mobile web and other forms of data were using 1.8GB a month in last year's Q1, this year that figure would be 4.6GB.

So which platform spawns the biggest consumers of data? The Android OS is the answer with the average user burning up 582MB per month. The report from Nielsen almost confirms that the carriers are on target by offering 5GB of data before throttling down the speed of data downloads. And after all, like the carrier's have been saying, we are talking about only the top 1% of users.

If data consumption continues at the current pace, the big problem will start to occur next year when the top 1% of data users averages more than 5GB of monthly data use. You average users will still have nothing to worry about for some time yet.

source: Nielsen via AndroidGuys

The average smartphone user increased his data usage by 89% year over year in Q1 of 2011