The Samsung Galaxy Note II was released this past fall as a successor to Samsung’s successful Galaxy Note. The unit was carried by all the major U.S. service providers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon) and global sales exceeded five million units within two months of release. As the phone is one of the most prominent devices within the so-called “phablet” market, Chitika Insights looked to examine how the devices have been received by different carrier subscribers.
The Samsung Galaxy Note II was released this past fall as a successor to Samsung’s successful Galaxy Note. The unit was carried by all the major U.S. service providers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon) and global sales exceeded five million units within two months of release.
As the phone is one of the most prominent devices within the so-called “phablet” market, Chitika Insights looked to examine how the devices have been received by different carrier subscribers. To quantify this report, Chitika Insights data scientists analyzed the distribution of Galaxy Note II traffic across North American carriers. The data for the study was drawn from millions of smartphone-based ad impressions observed within the Chitika Ad Network, spanning the week of February 14th through February 20th, 2013. A user agent analysis was then conducted to determine the percentage of traffic generated by each unique carrier variant of the smartphone. A graph depicting the distribution of traffic by service provider is presented below:
The traffic breakdown is heavily centered on the four major U.S.-based carriers, with only less than three percentage points separating AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. AT&T users generated a plurality of traffic amongst the North American service providers, accounting for 24.4% of traffic during the week studied. Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile were close behind, with users generating 23.7%, 22.4%, and 22.2% of Galaxy Note II traffic, respectively. Combined, the four major U.S. carriers constituted 92.6% of all Web traffic generated by North American users of the device. The remaining 7.2% of traffic was carried by other U.S. and Canadian carriers (which combine to total 4.7%) and U.S. Cellular (2.5%).
A similar Chitika Insights study performed on traffic for Samsung’s Galaxy S III found the highest percentage of traffic being carried by Sprint. While this study for the Galaxy Note II found a much more uniform distribution among the major providers, keep in mind that total wireless subscriber numbers for each carrier vary significantly.
- AT&T (107.0 million)
- Verizon (98.2 million)
- Sprint (55.6 million)
- T-Mobile USA (33.3 million)
The fact that Samsung Galaxy Note II usage rates are similar across all of the above service providers is another indicator that the unlimited data plans from Sprint and T-Mobile may be encouraging users of their services to browse the Web more frequently than their AT&T and Verizon counterparts. Both of the latter carriers employ metered data plans, with extra charges for data usage exceeding predetermined amounts.
In regards to the Galaxy Note II’s place within North American Samsung market, Chitika Insights generated the graph below. This illustrates the percentage of Web traffic coming from users of the Galaxy Note II as it compares to traffic coming from all North American-based Samsung smartphones:
At 6.3% of all North American Samsung Web traffic, Galaxy Note II users generate just over 1% of all smartphone Web traffic within the continent, when measured against previous statistics reported by Chitika Insights in February, 2013.