In the UK, free apps are gobbling-up 115Mb per hour, says a new research by Virgin Media Business.
The study found that among the top 50 free mobile apps, an average app consumes 0.89Mb in a five minute period and 10.7Mb in an hour.
The media group said that smartphone owners typically use apps for 667 minutes a month, equating to 119Mb a month or 1.4Gb each year.
The study also found that one popular consumer application, Tap Zoo, uses 9.6Mb of data in just five minutes and 115Mb in an hour i.e., Tap Zoo consumes 75,579% more data than the least data-hungry app, which uses a mere 13kb in a five minute period.
However, Pocket Gems, makers of the Tap Zoo app, denied these claims and said that Virgin Media Business had got its facts wrong.
"Their data is simply wrong," the company said in a statement. "The maximum amount of data transferred by playing all the way through to the highest level of Pocket Gems’ Tap Zoo is less than 70MB. There are 50 total levels in the game and for a reference point, it typically takes the average player 2 months to reach level 20."
Video streaming sites consume high mobile network traffic, according to the study. YouTube accounts for 17% of all mobile data traffic while a YouTube video on a mobile phone for one hour can use 130Mb of data.
Virgin Media Business mobile and broadcast head George Wareing said that spending just a few hours, using some applications or streaming multimedia content, can lead to huge traffic surges as vast amounts of data is downloaded.
"As apps become more sophisticated, and businesses look to develop their own applications for employees to use, problems with mobile networks getting clogged up will only intensify," Wareing said.
"With data traffic almost doubling in 2010 and smartphone sales set to increase by 50% in 2011, mobile operators really need to think about how they can manage the data explosion as millions more join the smartphone revolution."
