Exceeding Your Data Plan

July 19th, 2018

As a fairly new iPhone user, I am crazily in love with the capabilities the phone brings, it has become indispensable to me. My husband is also enthralled with his iPhone, to the tune of some pretty high bills lately.

My husband’s portion of our mobile phone bill this month is 68% above the regular amount because he went over his data plan, by a LOT. A couple of months ago he was over 150% above the plan because he was watching movies. When that bill arrived he was shocked (me too!). As a non-techie, he had no idea how much data movies and TV shows consume. Good news for the carriers – a lot of people don’t know what a MB or GB is.

Yet here we are in the next month and he’s still way over his plan. The culprit this time? Apps. A lot of Apps. I asked him to remove some apps – he removed over 20! And he installed an app that allows you to monitor your data usage and it warns you if you are near the maximum. It’s difficult to tell which apps are using a lot of data. I found an interesting article where someone analyzed how much data the iPhone consumed when using various apps. It’s not hard to use 10Mb just looking at a map.

The iPhone and Apps are a boon for carriers – increased data usage equals increased ARPU but it also means added strain on their network.

What I see happening (and of course I am not alone in this prediction) is hockey stick growth in the data market for mobile broadband. This video created by Alliance partner Commscope summarizes the exponential growth predicted nicely.