iPads Consume 400% More Wi-Fi Data than Other Mobile Devices

Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable reports: Apple’s iPad accounts for an ever-expanding percentage of the browser market. It’s also becoming a huge Wi-Fi data hog, consuming 400% more Wi-Fi data on a monthly basis than the average iPhone, iPod or Android device, according to a new report.

 

Meraki, a cloud services provider, anonymously surveyed more than 100,000 devices accessing public, educational and general use Wi-Fi networks in the U.S. It analyzed bandwidth usage and operating system popularity between 2010 and 2011 to uncover the massive gap between the Wi-Fi data usage of iPads and other mobile devices.

 

Mobile devices on the whole, according to the study, have usurped desktop platforms as the most ubiquitous Wi-Fi devices. In 2010, iOS and Android devices accounted for a combined 33% of Wi-Fi devices. Now they represent 58%. By comparison, Windows and Mac OS X devices together declined from 63% to 36% during the same time span.