I read a lot of telecom expense management blog post and most are, well, boring, irrelevant and unintelligent. When I read a good one, even if it overlaps what I sell, I like to post it and give them their props. The guys at Validas are doing some pretty cool things. Here it is.
So you use data on your cell phone. How much? What tier of data user are you—can you save money by getting a light data plan or are you a data hog who runs through a bunch of gigabytes every month? Verizon Wireless and Sprint make it simple, offering only unlimited plans for Smartphone customers. AT&T and T-Mobile offer tiered packages, both with 200MB set as the lowest data plan.
Picking 200MB of data as the threshold is an interesting choice. As you can see from the graph below, 200MB is about half the average data user’s monthly data consumption across the four main wireless carriers. (Ranging from 345.8MB for AT&T data users to 429.4MB for T-Mobile data users, the exact average comes out to 391.9MB.)
The spread here makes it seem like the 200MB plan would be the option for just a minority of light data users. After all, if the averages are twice that 200MB limit, wouldn’t most data users require one of the larger packages (up to 4GB on AT&T and up to 10GB on T-Mobile)?
No. In fact, around 60% of data users across the carriers consume less than the 200MB threshold every month:
This discrepancy between average data use versus most people’s data consumption points to a data hog minority whose extremely heavy usage rockets up the overall average and inflates the apparent necessity of bigger data plans. With around 60% of customers under the lowest tier of data, unlimited-only plans and 200MB minimum plans might be considered unnecessary subscription, if not mandatory over-subscription.
The imbalance becomes even more striking when we look at the median data user’s consumption, not even close to the 200MB minimum plan:
As you can see from the graph above, half of Verizon Wireless data users consumed less than 79.9MB monthly; half of AT&T data users consumed less than 88MB monthly; half of Sprint users consumed less than 93.4MB monthly; and half of T-Mobile data users consumed less than 133.8MB monthly. Average these median numbers together and we see that across all four carriers combined, half of data users consumed less than 98.8MB monthly. When we compare this cross carrier median data figure of about 100MB with the cross carrier average data figure of about 400MB (from the first “average data” graph above), we get a real sense of how much more data a few users at the top are consuming compared to the vast majority of the users at the middle and bottom—and how imbalanced the comparably low data usage of that majority is with the available heavy data plans.
