If you’re a data-heavy smartphone user, you belong on Sprint. That’s the findings of Validas, a company that specializes in tools to analyze cellular plan usage and spending. The average Sprint user spends about eight cents per megabyte, Validays says, which equals 12.5 megabytes for every $1 of data.
Sprint's numbers may be skewed though: its customers enjoy unlimited data plans, and a larger number are on its 4G network. Both factors likely contribute to higher data usage overall.
The worst deal in cellular data may surprise you, though. It’s actually T-Mobile, whose 23 cents per megabyte rate comes the worst of the big four. That equals about 4.3MB per $1 of data. While the carrier offers the least expensive data plans, T-Mobile’s coverage issues probably contribute to less data being used by its customers, resulting in higher overall data cost.
AT&T and Verizon are in the middle of the pack, with the former coming in at 18 cents per megabyte, and the latter 20 cents per megabyte.
"We think a usability issue like this may speak to a main reason why so many people are clearly not using nearly as much data as they’re buying: it’s not that people don’t want to use the data–it’s that they’re hampered by slow network speeds", the company said of the results in a blog post.