Mobile data – what are you paying for?
Mobile data eating your budget for breakfast? Here's why, and how to avoid it.
LIKING, sharing, uploading…scroll and scroll to the next best thing.
Most of us never leave the house without our trusty, fully-charged smart phone. It’s great to stay in the loop wherever you are. But how much of the data you pay for are you actually using?
In 2011, mybroadband.co.za published an article which listed 42MB of data per user per month as an across the board average for Android (Samsung, Sony) and Symbian (Nokia) , with Apple iPhone handsets leading the smartphone pack at around 112MB a month.
In a stark contrast, slideshare.net listed a 136% increase in mobile data usage between August 2012 and August 2013.
In 2014, your average user used 336Mb a month while leading cellular network provider Vodacom, made a staggering R6.2 billion in profits off data.
So here’s the deal…you’re paying to stay in touch. It’s a service we are all happy to pay for, for the luxury of being permanently connected. But which apps are chewing into your budget?
Pcworld.com published this table in 2012 regarding the data usage of photo sharing on social media. It charts the data usage after five 60KB images were uploaded and viewed, on the same network.
Data Cost of Social Network Photo Sharing
| Google+ | |||
| Uploading | 8MB | 6.5MB | 6MB |
| Viewing | 1.5MB | 0.5MB | 1MB |
Scary, right? Facebook uses a mass of data…think about it, 90% of posts on your Timeline contain pics, and the posts load as you scroll. The more you scroll, the more data you use, the more you pay.
Photo sharing apps which are popular in SA like SnapChat and Instagram are also data hungry, so keep this in mind when you browse on mobile data.
So which apps use the most data?
Depending on person to person usage, video streaming tops the list. Those vine videos which keeps you giggling until all hours, can cost you big time.
If you are watching a 4.5 Mbps 1080p HD movie on YouTube for 10 minutes over a fast internet connection, that’s about 34MB total.
Obviously you aren’t going to watch HD all the time, but it’s a good comparison.
A quick survey of my phone on a Monday morning showed these apps were used the most on mobile data:
1. YouTube
2.Facebook
3. WhatsApp
4. Facebook Messenger
5. Instagram
6. Twitter
7. Google Play Store
8. Google Services
It’s interesting to note that only three pics were uploaded onto Instagram, but it was browsed often, while WhatsApp was used to share location maps, pictures, video and audio.
