How much bandwidth does a smartphone use? How much bandwidth does an Apple iPad use? How much bandwidth does an Apple iPhone use?

How much bandwidth does a smartphone use? How much bandwidth does an Apple iPad use? How much bandwidth does an Apple iPhone use?

Wireless operators are struggling to keep up with demand as more people use their phones to check Facebook and watch videos online. Here are estimates of how much bandwidth is used per person for various activities on different phones.

One megabyte is roughly equivalent to one digital book, 45 seconds of music, or 20 seconds of medium-quality video.

Feature Phones such as the Motorola Razr are used primarily to make calls, and they consume littel bandwidth even for web activities because they have stripped-down web browsers. Feature phones and their users tend to consume around 100 Megabytes of data downloads a month, using 4 MB of voice calls an hour, and 4 to 5 MB of web browsing per hour.

Smartphones such as Research in Motion’s popular Blackberry, are used for phone calls, email, and light web browsing. Smartphones and their users tend to consume around 185 Megabytes of total monthly data downloads, utilizing 4 MB per hour for voice calls, and 4 to 5 MB of web browsing.

Superphones are advanced smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone and Motorola’s Droid, that make it easy for people to surf the web and watch online videos, leading to much higher bandwidth use.

Superphones and their users tend to consume around 560 Megabytes of total monthly data downloads, using 4 MB per hour for voice calls, 40 MB per hour for web browsing, 60 MB per hour for internet radio, and 200 MB per hour for YouTube videos.

Tablet computers such as Apple’s newly unveiled iPad are likely to send data use even higher. Th iPad will chew up even more bandwidth than the iPone because of its larger screen. Tablet computer and iPad users tend to consume 800 to 1,000 Megabytes of total monthly data downloads, using 50 to 60 MB per hour for web browsing, 60 MB per hour for internet radio, and 300 to 400 MB per hour for YouTube videos.

	Feature Phones	Smartphones	Superphones	Tablet Computers
Monthly Totals	100 MB	185 MB	560 MB	800-1K MB
Voice Calls	4 MB / Hr.	4 MB / Hr.	4 MB / Hr.
Web Browsing	4-5 MB/Hr.	4-5 MB/Hr	40 MB/Hr.	50-60 MB/Hr
Internet Radio			60 MB/Hr.	60 MB / Hr.
YouTube Videos			200MB/Hr	3-400MB/Hr.

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