Conventional wisdom has it that Millennials, aged 22 to 37 in 2018 according to Pew Research Center, are major consumers of data-heavy apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Netflix. These multimedia apps and others can eat up GBs of data each month. Because of this, one might rightly assume that Millennials use more data than their older peers. Using information collected from Strategy Analytics’ AppOptix panel, we can see that this is most certainly true when it comes to Wi-Fi, but not necessarily true when it comes to cellular data.

Millennials, roughly represented by the first two age groups, use much more data on Wi-Fi than the 36+ crowd. As the chart illustrates, consumers overall use much more data on Wi-Fi than on cellular—between 2.3 and 4.1x more GB of data on average (per day or month). Conversely, while the 46+ age group has an average cellular data usage roughly 2GB lower than that of the younger groups, the rest have more comparable levels of usage.