Ever since AT&T and Verizon did away with unlimited data plans and T-Mobile offered unlimited-but-throttled plans, Sprint has been bragging about both that its unlimited plan has no cap and that its 4G network is quite speedy. And according to the results of a new study, Sprint users are gobbling up much more data than subscribers to any of the other companies.

The study, conducted by Validas, looked at 47,000 phone bills during the period of time from July 2010 to June 2011 and found that the median Sprint smartphone user consumes 371MB of data per month, more than twice that of AT&T smart-phone users.

And while the gap wasn’t as mammoth when it came to average monthly data consumption, Sprint users still used the most — 779 MB, 354MB more than second-place AT&T.

Writes our corporate kin at Consumer Reports:

Dylan Breslin-Barnhart, the Validas consumer-product evangelist who crunched the numbers for us, attributes the data-use differences to Sprint’s faster-4G-network leadership, which enables users to download data at up to 10 times the speed of today’s 3G networks. And faster downloading no doubt encourages more data use.

Regardless of who uses the most, a look at the numbers below shows that the average smartphone user doesn’t approach even 1GB of data each month, meaning you may want to consider that when selecting a data plan for your smartphone.

(New data hogs in the pen: Sprint smart-phone users) [Consumer Reports]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.