According to recent statistics released by Validas, a firm that optimizes wireless phone bills, the users of Verizon’s handsets consume more data per month than the users of the Apple iPhone, at the ratio of 1.25 to 1.

The Validas findings – based on an analysis of 20,000 wireless bills between January and May 2010 - indicate that though iPhone users have widely been known to be notorious data hogs, virtually raiding the network of the iPhone’s exclusive US carrier, AT&T; it is actually the users of the Verizon smartphones that consume more data per month.

Going by the statistics put forth by Validas, 11 percent of Verizon subscribers use between 500MB and 1GB per month; vis-à-vis merely 5.6 percent of iPhone users consuming similar data. Furthermore, Verizon’s users of non-Blackberry smartphones consume 421MB data per month, on an average; while the average monthly consumption of data of AT&T’s iPhone users was 338MB.

The Validas’ findings further revealed that despite the fact that a number of iPhone users raised a hue and cry when AT&T recently put a 2GB data restriction on its subscribers, that much bandwidth is barely 1.6 percent of iPhone users, as against nearly 4 percent of Verizon smartphone users.

Validas said that it did not include the monthly data consumption of BlackBerry users because these handsets “do not follow similar data consumption patterns to those of iPhones and other smartphones,” because of RIM’s “data compression techniques.”