Analysts at Bernstein Research estimate that the iPhone in particular consumers 5-7 times the monthly bandwidth of an average wireless device—and twice the amount of an average smartphone.

According to a report by the University of California, San Diego, overall, from 1980 to 2008, the number of bytes we consume has increased 6 percent each year, the researchers said, adding up to a 350 percent increase over 28 years.

A report by the University of California, San Diego, calculates that American households collectively consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008.

Nick Bilton, “The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day,” New York Times Bits [blog]. December 9, 2009.

Blistering wireless data growth means that it must be now measured in petabytes, with each unit representing a quadrillion bytes or about 100 times all the text contained in the 650 miles of bookshelves in the Library of Congress.

According to Apple, the App Store’s virtual shelves are stocked with more than 100,000 applications. [The company also] recently said that consumers had downloaded more than two billion applications from its store.

CTIA estimates more than 20 percent of households use only wireless for voice, and cellphone users make more than 290,000 calls daily to 911 and other emergency services.

Furthermore, the top 20% of subscribers account for fully 80% of total Internet traffic.

Owing to a Spanish language client Ares is huge in parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, where it accounts for as much as 34% of upstream traffic and 9% of downstream traffic, a far cry from its modest global contribution of about 1% of all traffic.

A heavy user is responsible for more than 200 times the total bytes of an average subscriber