NEWBURY, England, Jan. 6 (UPI) -- On the world's congested mobile airwaves, just 10 percent of users consume 90 percent of wireless bandwidth, a report by a British monitoring company says.
Arieso in Newbury, England, which advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, said it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November to determine bandwidth usage, The New York Times reported.
The biggest consumers, the company said, are a mix of business users gaining access to the Internet over a 3G network while traveling and individuals with generous or unlimited mobile data packages watching videos, the main cause of the excess traffic.
And the gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, Arieso said.
In 2009, the top 3 percent of heavy users generated 40 percent of network traffic. Now, Arieso said, these users are responsible for 70 percent of the traffic.
Sixty-four percent of extreme users were using laptops, a third were using smartphones and 3 percent had iPads or other tablet computers, it said.
