1 Percent of Mobile Users Hog 50 Percent of Capacity

As in the national debate over the economy, the mobile world, it seems, also has a "1 percent." But rather than hogging all the wealth, this 1 percent hogs data.

A new study by Arieso, a London-based firm that provides network management software solutions, suggests that just 1 percent of mobile Internet users are hogging a whopping 50 percent of all the data surging through wireless connections.

And with an "explosive" growth in mobile data demand, Apple's newest iPhone model, the 4S, not surprisingly has the hungriest users. Comparing data usage across a variety of smartphones and connected devices, Arieso found that 4S users demand three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, the most demanding lot in last year's study. The data-heavy Siri voice-command-operated data assistant is a primary feature of the 4S, and soon after its release Apple's server for the system briefly crashed.

3G Benchmark

Arieso used the usage level of iPhone 3G as a "normalized benchmark" by which to compare other smartphones. The other top smartphones for data hogs are HTC and Google's Nexus One, Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10i and HTC's Desire.

Michael Flanagan, CTO of Arieso and author of the study, said the data was gathered from network operators in a European city and its suburbs. But he said "many parts of the study are illustrative results, no matter what country you are in."

In a phone interview from London, Flanagan said it was impossible to determine precisely how those data hogs are using their phones because the information is collected through billable data meters, not from application usage.

"However," he said, "we can speculate based on other work we do that this very much falls into two categories of known devices: 3G data card or dongle-type plug-in laptop users, which are...