Three says monthly data use by its four million contract mobile phone customers has “more than doubled” in less than a year.
On average contract customers used 1.1GB of data compared to just 450MB last summer.
Three offers all you can eat data on all of its tariffs with prices on Pay As You Go and Pay Monthly starting from £13 per month.
The network says its iPhone and “premium Android” users download almost 1.5GB per month, “significantly more than the allowances of 1GB or less sold to 66% of the UK’s smartphone users on competing networks”.
Dave Dyson, chief executive officer, Three said: “With 95% of our smartphone customers using data on a daily basis, everyone is relying more than ever on their handset to do all the stuff they used to do on the internet at home or work. And there is no sign of this slowing down.
“Give consumers a combination of the right device, the right price plan and a mobile network built for the internet and you see a rapid behavioural shift. We are seeing more and more people using more and more data throughout the day.
“Price plans that remove the fear of going over a data limit enable demand to grow as consumers are free to discover just how much they can do on the move. Even I don’t understand how much data I use on a daily basis so it’s no surprise that having an all you can eat worry-free data package is proving to be so popular with our customers.”
Graham Baxter, chief operating officer at Three, added: “Since 2008 we have invested over £1 billion in almost doubling the size of our network and boosting its capacity and quality in order to handle this data traffic explosion. Today we have an award-winning network and it’s the only network in the UK that’s built specifically for the mobile internet. We cover 98% of the UK’s population and it’s great to see that our customers are doing so much more of the things they enjoy on their smartphones.”