Average U.S. Smartphone Data Usage Up 89% as Cost per MB Goes Down 46%

According to Nielsen’s monthly analysis of cellphone bills for 65,000 lines, smart phone owners, especially those with iPhones and Android devices, are consuming more data than ever before on a per-user basis, but since prices are flat, the price-per-consumed-megabyte has dropped.

In the last 12 months, the amount of data the average smartphone user consumes per month has grown by 89 percent from 230 Megabytes in the first quarter of 2010 to 435 MBytes in the first quarter of 2011.

Data usage for the top 10 percent of smartphone users is up 109 percent, as you would expect. Heavy users are heavy users. The top one percent of users have grown their usage by 155 percent from 1.8 GBytes in the first quarter of 2010 to over 4.6 GBytes in the first quarter of 2011.

Still, though growth is occurring across the board, at the 80th percentile and below, users consume 500 Mbytes or less each month. In the 60th percentile, users consume 250 Mbytes or less each month.

The amount the average smartphone user pays per unit of data has dropped by nearly 50 percent in the last year, from 14 cents per megabyte to eight cents.

Average U.S. Smartphone Data Usage Up 89% as Cost per MB Goes Down 46%