Unlimited Data Plans Not Yet Necessary - Nielsen

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Smartphones are all the rage nowadays, and along with Internet-capble phones come data plans. Now your carrier might be marketing an unlimited data plan, which will cost some money. Should you bite?

Unlimited data plans promise you that you won’t need to contend with headaches over excess usage charges, so this might be attractive if you use a smartphone or tablet for mobile Internet. But a recent Nielsen study says not everyone needs an unlimited plan. In fact, only 10% of smartphone users will ever exceed 1 GB.

While smartphone data use has increased 89% across the board, most users won’t even exceed their monthly allocation. The typical Android smartphone user will eat up about 582 Megabytes of data per month. Meanwhile, the top 1% users will consume about 4.6 GB per month.

Looking into the percentile usage, only 1% will exceed 4.5 GB. Only 2% will exceed 2.5 GB. Only 5% will exceed 1.5 GB.

So this leads to the question: do you need an unlimited plan? Perhaps if you’ve been tethering your smartphone and using it as your main connection for your laptop, then you will probably need a big allocation. But if all you do is do some mobile surfing, check emails, download apps and chat, then you might be within the “typical” range, and 1 GB of bandwidth would be more than enough.

But as mobile content becomes richer and richer (with video downloads, FaceTime and over-the-air firmware updates), how long will it be until we really need unlimited plans for our smartphones?