I use my phone's WiFi whenever possible, such as home, school, work, girlfriend's, friends', etc., yet I still end up in the top 5%! This is because I pay for Netflix on top of all of that other stuff, and I use it! I stream maybe ~10-15 movies/mo from Netflix, usually on WiFi but occasionally on road-trips (phone's output connects to my car's aftermarket Pioneer "AVIC" 7" In-Dash DVD/Nav Head-Unit). I also will use it to stream Pandora or other internet-sourced music while driving in the same car, so it comes via 3G. Fortunately, I have a 2TB hard-drive integrated to the head-unit, so I can "capture" songs off Pandora and whatnot.
I also do a lot of online browsing, and while I don't use Adobe Flash, and have control over what scripts run/don't run, it still eats up data at a decent rate.
All said and done, last month (1 road-trip with 5 movies, 9 other movies, 788 songs, 2982 web pages, 28 picture-messages, 3 video-messages, and more), I ended up over 10GB of data usage.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that the following happened:
From November 8th until November 19th, I was averaging 1.523Mbps download speed (average of 27 speed tests, various locations: home, school, work, etc). Beginning mid-day November 20th, I noticed websites were taking longer to load, and my music was choppy... Average of 33 speed tests conducted from mostly-the-same locations, from November 20th to December 7th: 0.471Mbps. WOW.
On November 20th, I logged on to MyVZW, and saw that I had consumed: 5134.2MB of DATA.
As of December 8th, I am now averaging 1.492Mbps, so we'll see how long that lasts...
Throttling exists, and it doesn't matter where you are at.... I live in a Suburb of a big city, in a town with a population of 6k but we have a lot of cell towers... Still, even at 3AM while in my home (which is PERFECTLY located between 3 towers) I was getting data throttled, and never exceeded 500kbps after hitting 5MB of data.
It is BS.