While there are dozens of smartphones that work pretty well for surfing the web and using apps, it was the iPhone that got the mobile web really started. To quantify that point, AT&T's mobile network handles 30 times more data than it did three years ago. Not to let the company off the hook, but it would have been tough for anybody to keep up with that sort of usage growth.



The estimated growth in data traffic on AT&T's mobile network has slowed, the carrier's CTO said Tuesday, though it remains explosive at more than 3,000 percent over the past three years.

The volume of mobile data traffic grew from just over 1 billion megabytes in the third quarter of 2007 to about 30.3 billion megabytes in the third quarter of this year, CTO John Donovan told an audience of developers at the Sencha Conference in San Francisco.

That growth rate of about 30 times is down from three-year growth of about 50 times earlier this year, he said. However, expansion is hardly screeching to a halt. "If you look in absolute numbers, it's still a tremendous growth rate," Donovan said. He attributed the change to the difficulty of an already very large number to keep increasing rapidly.