Wireless Carriers Make $16.7 Billion a Year on Your Capped Data
You might think capping your data plan would save you money. But if you don’t meet the cap, you’re wasting data — and that’s money in the carrier coffers.
Would you be better off blowing past your wireless carrier’s data cap every month? New research is showing that might be the case-at least then you’d be getting what you pay (extra) for.
The bloggers at ItsWorthMore (a site for trading in old electronics for cash) did a survey of 1,000 US citizens on Amazon Mechanical Turk; all respondents claimed they knew what their data plan was. 42 percent of them had a capped data plan, while 41 percent had unlimited data, a pretty even split. (The rest use family plans or prepaid phones, except for 3 percent who weren’t sure what kind of plan they had, because that’s how surveys go.)
Of that 42 percent with capped data, around 12 percent of them go over their limit each month (the average data cap was 5 gigabytes a month, but keep in mind “caps” can vary wildly). So that means 88 percent of capped subscribers consistently use less than their data allotment. It didn’t seem to break down much across demographics, either. No matter the age or gender, people were letting that data go unused.
The infographic below spells out ItsWorthMore’s calculations based on average pricing for capped data plans. They did the math to get to an average of wasted data being 26.5 percent, which when applied to the average capped plan price, means $16.56 a month was essentially being given to the carrier for nothing. That’s $198.68 per year per person, on average.
That’s $16.7 billion (across around 83.5 million potential users, based on census data and Pew Research findings).
And of course, the most waste comes from iPhone users. Android users are more frugal, saving $51 a month compared to those in the Apple ecosystem.
The cost per gigabyte with an average capped plan comes to $11.91. In an unlimited plan, that drops to $6.96 per GB!
The moral is: Pay more upfront for unlimited, and you’re probably saving money. Sort of.
You can read a lot more about the justifications for an unlimited plan and some data-saving strategies in the full report at ItsWorthMore.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com on November 1, 2019.
