In what should be surprising to no one, it seems that people use your services more when you don’t slap them with overage fees for going over monthly allotted limits. Quartz draws our attention to some new data released by Macquarie Capital showing that average monthly data use by T-Mobile and Sprint customers surged in the first quarter of 2014 and now customers of both carriers consume significantly more data per month than rivals Verizon and AT&T.
As you can see from the graph posted above, both Sprint and T-Mobile subscribers used more than 2GB of data per month in the first quarter this year while Verizon and AT&T subscribers used roughly 0.5GB less.
We’ve argued before that data caps have made subscribing to LTE services from Verizon and AT&T relatively pointless and we really don’t see anything in this data to change our minds. In fact, we find ourselves envious of Sprint and T-Mobile customers’ ability to watch videos on their smartphones without worrying about getting hit with big overage fees, even though we’re well aware of both carriers’ other deficiencies when it comes to network quality.
Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be surprising to see AT&T and Verizon ease up on their data cap policies a little more if T-Mobile keeps posting quarters like the last one where it added 2.4 million net new customers.
