AROUND the world, the iPhone-toting bunch has cranked up a healthy appetite for data services.
In Europe, Deutsche Telekom noticed that the device was driving up data usage by as much as 30 times compared to other phones.
So did AT&T in the United States. When the phone was first launched last year, its users overloaded the company's Edge, or enhanced GSM, network.
For O2 in the United Kingdom, about 60 per cent of its iPhone subscribers were sending or receiving more than 25MB of data a month, compared to only 1.8 per cent of its other mobile customers.
The same pattern holds true for Singapore.
Ever since the Apple iPhone went on sale here at the end of August, users have been hunched over the phone's large touchscreen, checking weather reports, watching YouTube videos, browsing news websites and retrieving stock prices over the Internet.
SingTel, the first telco here to sell the highly anticipated phone has noticed increased wireless data consumption driven by its iPhone users.
A SingTel spokesman said that iPhone users are responsible for twice as much data usage as users of other phones.
Not to be outdone, other cellphone makers have come up with a slew of Net-friendly phones that make Web surfing on their gizmos much easier.
Gone are the clunky buttons and tiny screens.
In their place, sleek, generous touchscreens. Early contenders like the HTC Touch Diamond and Samsung Omnia also had specially customised user interfaces and browsers that make navigation more fuss-free.
As a result, other telcos here have seen a data usage explosion too.
For StarHub, data traffic reached a new high. Some 374,869GB of data travelled through the telco's networks in the first quarter of this year from usage by its post-paid customers. That is a staggering 89-fold increase over the 3,194GB it logged in the same period last year.
M1 said data earnings make up a larger portion of its total revenue.
Mobile data earnings were 9.6 per cent of the telco's revenue in the third quarter of this year, compared to 7.8 per cent in the same period last year.
Four years after rolling out 3G services here, the three telcos are also boosting their high-speed mobile networks, which already offer 3.5G services, with download speeds of 7.2Mbps.
SingTel has promised speeds of up to 42Mbps by the end of next year. This means very zippy surfin - think downloading files in 10 seconds instead of a minute.
StarHub has said it will offer 21Mbps by June next year, while M1 is also looking to ramp up its network speed by the end of the year to 14.4Mbps.
This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on 29 October 2008.
