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Most of us are concerned with the amount of data we use each month on our phone contracts. But what exactly is data, how much do you need, and how can you bring your data usage under control?
These days, data allowance is the most important component of your mobile contract. Where once it was the number of remaining minutes and texts that had us anxiously checking our plans come the end of the month, it’s now all about the gigabytes.
Just why is that? How much data do you really need? And which activities consume the most data? Read on for the answer to these and many other questions.
Put simply, data is the informal name for what your smartphone uses every time you do anything that connects to the internet over a mobile connection. Wi-Fi doesn’t count here.
This can include a wide variety of tasks, including surfing the web, sending messages on WhatsApp, checking your Facebook app, streaming a film or series on Netflix, or playing a move against a friend in your favourite game.
Data is most commonly measured in megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB). There are around 1000MB in 1GB (1024 specifically, but companies tend to round down).
Moving down the scale, 1MB is made up of 1024 kilobytes or KB, though you won’t tend to see that smaller unit referenced quite so much on modern mobile contracts and app listings.
We’ve defined what data is, and how it’s measured. But how much data does it take to do the everyday things we all do on our smartphones?
Here are a few common examples:
According to Wirefly you’ll use about 1.5MB of data every minute you spend scrolling your news feed and viewing photos on the Facebook app. That translates to 90MB an hour, or around 1GB in 11 hours. That might not sound like much, but if you only spend 20 minutes a day on Facebook you’ll have spent 10 hours on it in a month, and data use almost doubles when viewing videos on Facebook.
Split 1GB out evenly over a month and it’s 250MB per week, or around 35MB per day. That really isn’t a lot at all, so we’d make this your absolute minimum data allowance unless you’re literally on Wi-Fi all day every day.
To be more precise, 1GB of data will cover at most an hour of web or social media browsing per day, or about 30 minutes of music streaming per day – depending on the quality you choose and the sites you visit you might be looking at less than that.
If you streamed an hour or so of music from Spotify in a day, you’d use up between 10MB and 150MB of data depending on the streaming quality you use. With ‘normal’ quality it’s likely to be around 45MB per hour. At that quality you’d be looking at around 1.5GB of data use per month if you streamed music for an hour per day. Figures will vary with different music services, but are likely to be in that ballpark.
As with music streaming services, you can choose your video quality (and therefore your data use) when watching content on Netflix. At the low end you can use just 1GB of data every 6 hours, while medium quality will use around 1GB every 4 hours, and high quality shoots up to 3GB or more every hour.
So your data use here can vary wildly depending on how crisp you want the video to be, but for the best quality you’re going to need a very high data allowance if you plan to stream much.
As with other categories, data use will also vary on other video streaming platforms, but as a general rule this is one of the most data-hungry activities you can do with your phone.
With the above information as a rough guide, you should be able to plot out how much data you use in a day, week, and ultimately month.
It’s important to do this sort of calculation because mobile contracts always give you a monthly data allowance, which needs to be rationed over a four-weekly period.
Here’s a rough guide on what you’ll get from some common mobile contract data allowances. We’ve used the stats above coupled with Three’s data-estimation tool as the basis for the following calculations, so do check it according to your specific requirements.
Alternatively, there are similarly useful data calculation tools provided by the likes of Vodafone and GiffGaff.
Split 1GB out evenly over a month and it’s 250MB per week, or around 35MB per day. That really isn’t a lot at all, so we’d make this your absolute minimum data allowance unless you’re literally on Wi-Fi all day every day.
To be more precise, 1GB of data will cover at most an hour of web or social media browsing per day, or about 30 minutes of music streaming per day – depending on the quality you choose and the sites you visit you might be looking at less than that.
Now we’re starting to get somewhere. On an 8GB mobile data plan allowance, you’ll be able to indulge in around six hours of web browsing per day.
Alternatively, 8GB should be good for around an hour of medium quality Netflix streaming per day, or around 4 hours of music streaming on normal quality. This again can vary dramatically depending on the service you’re using though, so if in doubt check the data use for the specific streaming services you use.
So far we’ve discussed practical data usage in individual cases, but in real world use it’s the mixed scenarios that really see it totting up.
For example, according to Three you’d ideally want a 30GB data plan to cover an hour of browsing, 25 emails, an hour of social media usage, an hour of music streaming, and 15 minutes of YouTube video streaming combined per day. In many cases that 30GB would probably go further, but you should be able to manage that at an absolute minimum.
Three’s own calculator jumps straight from 30GB to unlimited, which is understandable since once you go above 30GB, data allowances tend to get very high and are close to unlimited anyway.
With 100GB you could manage 33 hours of high quality streamed Netflix content per month, or a wide mix of uses, including more than triple what we’ve listed above in the 30GB category. This should be more than enough for most people, but if that still won’t cut it then an unlimited data plan should be ideal for you, as with that there are no limits.
Here are some practical methods anyone can use to bring their data usage down each month. Do this, and you might be able to lower your data plan and pay less come the end of the month.
Downloading new apps and app updates can eat a lot of data, particularly when it comes to games. We’d recommend only doing this when you’re connected to Wi-Fi. You should also therefore make sure your phone isn’t set to automatically update apps using mobile data.
To do this, on iOS go to Settings, tap the App Store heading and turn off Use Mobile Data.
On Android go into the Google Play Store, tap your profile picture in the top right corner, then go to Settings, followed by ‘Network preferences’, and make sure ‘Auto update apps’ is set to ‘Over Wi-Fi only’.
The likes of Netflix and Facebook can really run away with your data allowance if you let them. But both have built-in tools to help lessen the impact.
In Netflix, go into the App Settings menu, tap on Mobile Data Usage and change the option to Save Data (or if you only want to stream on Wi-Fi, change it to Wi-Fi Only).. Your videos will look marginally less sharp on the Save Data setting, but you’ll go from using around 1GB every 20 minutes on the top option to just 1GB every six hours.. If you select ‘Automatic’ then you’ll use around 1GB every four hours. This is the equivalent of normal quality.
Video content can be a major data hog in Facebook too, especially when it plays automatically. To disable this, head into the app’s Settings menu, then ‘Media and contacts’ and change the Autoplay setting to On Wi-Fi Connections Only.
Turn mobile data off when not needed
This is a blunt but very easy and effective method. If you’re going into a situation where you don’t need to use any mobile data (going into a film, a meal out, work or school for example), why not turn your mobile data connection off altogether?
You’ll still get your calls and texts through as normal, but none of the apps running in the background will be able to make use of your data allowance.
On iOS, simply head to Settings > Mobile Data, and turn the Mobile Data toggle off. On most Android phones you can swipe down from the top of the screen and hit the mobile data icon to turn it off.
