I have an embarrassing confession to make: for the greater part of last year I subscribed to that 200 MB plan. Yes, yes, for shame. I’m a wireless technology writer. What am doing with a plan many of you would only advise your grandmothers to buy? In my defense I am a) very cheap and at the time was paying my own mobile bill (no longer, thanks GigaOM!), and b) am not really a gadget nor app writer (we have another Kevin who’s much better at it than I am). It’s sad to say, but I’m more intrigued by the radio connection between the phone and the network than by the phone itself.

But to be honest, I also really wasn’t consuming that much data – at least not on the mobile network. While in the wild, my primary smartphone use was email, social networking, maps and web surfing. I’d listen to Pandora and watch the occasional video, but I was also chintzy enough that I made sure to take advantage of every Wi-Fi access point available. Also, years of being an AT&T customer had trained me to save my app and bigger file downloads for home or work where a broadband network was readily available.

I still went over my 200 MB budget – quite often actually, and since this was before the throttled “unlimited” plans were introduced, I paid for that extra data. But the additionally overage charges I incurred were still far cheaper than the additional $20 a month I would have paid for a 2 GB plan (since then T-Mobile has lowered data rates considerably). I realize that 200 MBs may see like an intolerably low amount of data to many of you, but at the time it was all I needed, and I was using my smartphone constantly.

Of course, like all smartphone users, my data hunger became more ravenous. Overage charges eventually well exceeded the cost of upgrading to the next data, and I was also sick of the fact that I couldn’t use my phone as a mobile hotspot. Today I’m a 5 GB per month customer, and ironically my typical monthly data usage is even less now than it was last year. Because I now work from home, I’m rarely ever off Wi-Fi, but in months where I travel that usage shoots well into the multi-gigabyte range.

I can understand T-Mobile’s reasoning for shutting down the 200 MB plan, though. It recently reported that its average smartphone user consumes 760 MB a month, and a customer on one of its super-fast 42-Mbps HSPA+ devices eats up a whooping 1.3 GB. At such levels, there are few smartphone users that can reasonably expect to remain under the 200 MB thresholds each and every month. The difference between the 200 MB and 2 GB plans was only $10, as well, so arguments for thriftiness go out the window.

But, it’s never good to see a carrier reduce the number of data options its customers have, especially a carrier like T-Mobile, whose reputation is built on undercutting the other carriers on price. The average consumer may have outgrown the 200 MB but I guarantee there is still a substantial minority of people out there who are either using their smartphones sparingly or fighting tooth and nail to keep as many megabytes off the cellular airwaves as possible. I should know: I was that customer just a year ago.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Alistair Scott

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That’s the word according to Onavo, a mobile data management and compression service, that has done some work to figure which are the most popular mobile music apps and what their data usage is. Onavo, which runs user traffic through its compression servers to reduce data usage, pulled anonymous data from more than 100,000 users in October, looking at music apps that connected to the Internet.

Onavo found that TuneIn, which lets people live-stream local radio stations, was the top music service on the iPhone in October, with 6.6 percent of users on the service at some point during the month. TuneIn came out ahead of Pandora (5.8 percent) and Spotify (3.6 percent), while all other music services had less than one-percent penetration.

On Android, Android Music — the music player for Android which can now connect to Music Beta, Google’s cloud service for streaming a user’s personal content – has the highest penetration with 7.6 percent, followed by download and streaming service Amazon MP3 (5.4 percent). Amazon’s service is a combination of downloads and music streamed from its Cloud Drive/Cloud Player service which works on Kindle and Android devices. After that, TuneIn Radio (4.9 percent) is third ahead of Pandora (4.6 percent) and Spotify (3.2 percent).

Pandora users consumed the most 3G data, according to Onavo, gobbling up an average of 139 megabytes per user monthly on iOS and 122 megabytes per month on Android. Rhapsody (147 MB per month) had even higher data consumption on iOS though much less on Android. The high usage may be a combination of more dedicated users and the fact that Pandora subscribers get higher quality audio with a higher bitrate than non-subscribers.

Now take this all with a grain of salt; Onavo isn’t a seasoned market research firm, and this isn’t a simple comparison of identical services. Pandora is more of a personalized Internet radio service, while Spotify offers streaming from an unlimited library. TuneIn radio does music from local radio stations but additionally runs talk, sports, news and other programming which are also big draws. But it’s still interesting to see how popular TuneIn Radio is with Onavo’s users, who lean more toward early adopters. It shows that there’s still a lot of appeal in tapping traditional radio, which has a wide diversity of programmed content. The results also show that Android users appear to be taking advantage of Android Music Beta and Amazon’s MP3 music service.

It’s also interesting to see what the average data footprint is for certain services. Pandora won’t bust most users’ data caps, but it’s still a significant amount of average data use. Increasingly, users may have to start counting their bits as they come up against new data caps. That’s of course the business that Onavo and other data compression services are in. But it’s a reality that music lovers are going to have to deal with more in the future.

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