Mobile data usage tripled since 2010 among US teens

Teens aged
13-17 in U.S. used an average of 320MB of data per month on their phones, which
has increased by 256 percent, if compared to the consumption of last year, says
a study from Nielsen.

 

The study has
been conducted by using the data of monthly cell phone bills of over 65,000
mobile subscribers over Q3 2011. It shows that the mobile data consumption by
US teenagers has more than tripled in the past year.

 

The study
further claims that teen males consume 382MB per month, which is higher than
teen females. Teen females consume 266 MB per month.

 

The explosion
in data usage is being driven by an increase in the popularity of media-rich
activities – like music, video and the use of apps – which themselves is being
fuelled by higher smartphone penetration. As data usage increases, operators
need to work out how to maintain the speed and quality of their service and how
to charge appropriately,” said
David Gosen, Nielsen managing director telecom Europe.

 

The study also
revealed that messaging is the most common activity for teens in the US, each
sending and receiving an average of 3,417 SMS and MMS messages per month –
seven messages every waking hour.

 

However, Voice
usage has declined from an average of 685 minutes to 572 minutes over the last
year. When surveyed, the top three reasons given by US teens as to why they
prefer messaging to calling were because it is faster (22 per cent), easier (21
per cent), and more fun (18 per cent).

 

In its earlier
study,
Nielson found that American Internet users devote more time to Facebook than
any other site, spending a total of 53.5 billion minutes a month using the
social network at home and at work. That’s more than Yahoo (17.2 billion
minutes), Google (12.5 billion), YouTube (9.1 billion), Blogger (724 million),
Tumblr  (624 million) and Twitter (565 million) combined.

 

By
Telecomlead.com Team
e[email protected]