Study iPhone 5s Owners Top the Charts in Cellular Data Consumption

New research report from JDSU (via TechCrunch) found that owners of the iPhone 5s are using significantly more data than iPhone 5 owners consumed last year - twenty percent more, and are described as having “unprecedented increases in uplink and downlink data demands”.

The survey measured the data usage in both developed and developing markets, across more than a million mobile device users. The results show that iPhone 5s and fourth-generation iPad owners used the most data, with the Android-based HTC Sensation and the Sony Xperia SP coming up closely behind.

Users of the latest iPhone 5s consume more downlink data than any other smartphone users in both markets under study, consuming almost seven times and twenty times as much as the benchmark iPhone 3G users. This is consistent with the trend seen over the past three years where users of the flagship iPhone devices were the most data-hungry smartphone users. As in past years, we are not in a position to directly identify the root causes of this data consumption.

The study found that iPhone 5c and iPad mini owners used less data than owners of Apple's more expensive devices. It was also found that 4G LTE users are using 10x more data than 3G users. The iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s are the only LTE capable iPhones, while the iPhone 4s and below support 3G networks.

This year, the research reveals 0.1 percent of 4G users consume more than half of the entire LTE downlink data. As such, 4G users are 10 times more data hungry than 3G users, of whom 1 percent still consume half of the 3G downlink data.

Source: TC