Bangalore: Airwave traffic has been receiving half of its requests from just 1% of mobile users worldwide, according to a report from the New York Times. Arieso, a network firm in England, judged the bandwidth usage gap between extreme users and the rest of the population. Compared to 2009 when heavy users generated 40 percent of all network traffic, their contribution has currently hiked to 70 percent.  

According to Ericsson, the leading manufacturer of mobile network equipment, although only 13.2 percent of the global mobile phone market is taken up by Smartphones, countries such as Britain, Sweden, Finland, Germany, and the United States have more than 30 percent of their entire mobile market flooded with the devices. This puts immense pressure on mobile operators to keep their networks unclogged, especially with phones such as the iPhone 4S having apps like the Siri (the voice-based personal assistant) that doubles data consumption on the networks.

Taking Finland, for example, Pal Zarandy, an analyst at Rewheel, a research firm in Helsinki, Finland stated that along with mobile phones, around 35 percent of the Finnish population also used portable laptop modems and dongles that provided unlimited data plans for as less as 5 Euros a month. Finns consequently use about 1 GB of data  on wireless network per month, which is more or less 10 times the European average.

Most mobile operators have started to look for ways in which they could make their networks efficient of processing heavy loads, said Patrik Cerwall, head of strategic marketing and intelligence at Ericsson, the most well known of which was to restrict customers’ data volume limits. AT&T sent some of its prime data-using customers emails about the same last year.

New York Times reported that Ericsson predicted a tenfold ncrease in the volume of global mobile data by 2016.