How much data do you actually use?

I have a 100GB plan, and generally use 20-30GB in a standard month.

However, that can and does shoot up to 70+GB when I’m away from London (and therefore not in a dead zone on the tube and away from fast internet).

I’ve used 10GB so far since the 26th.

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I’m paying £5 per month for 2.25 GB. Generally, I use about 200-500 MB per month, and iD’s data rollover results in 4 GB allowance per month. I might use more if I ever go on a holiday i.e. get out of London. :grinning:

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I’m on 12GB per month for £15 which is a retention deal, though seeing a few similar deals in the January sales. If I’m on holiday for a couple of weeks I’ll get close to getting through it due to the auto upload of photos taken on my phone.

The rest of the time depends a bit on the amount of commuting I’m doing as I work from home, and tether on the way to/from the office. Looking at recent bills, it’s anything 3.5GB to 9GB, with the month I was on holiday for 2 weeks being 11.5GB just under the full allowance. It’s got a bit lower with more working from home.

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I pay £16 per month for 20gb of data and I probably use 6gb at most.

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I pay £7.50/month for 2GB data, but only use around 600MB most months. Sometimes I use a bit over 1GB, but never the full 2GB.

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I had a look back at my giffgaff and SMARTY accounts to see how much data I’ve used each month in the past year. Consistently pretty low, and agrees with my hunch that I’ve been using less and less data over time.

Usage in October is unknown while April was literally about zero.

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I had a look at the EE app on my phone and I cannot find my historic usage.

So I consulted the (PDF) bills. There doesn’t appear to be any usage information whatsoever.

Frustrating.

I’ve found this too and iPhones don’t break it down at all. I’ve reset my data counter and trying to keep track. Doesn’t help that I’ve got some abnormal usage thanks to work but I’m trying to get a baseline!

My main problem has been that I use a lot of data ‘because I can’ for example not using Wi-Fi at work because the 4G mast is outside the office so why bother, etc.

If I didn’t use my communal WiFi and used just data my mobile phone provider would be crying.

I :heart: stats! It’s one thing I really miss about Android and annoys me about Apple! I mean they don’t even have an Hard Drive Activity Light on their Computers!

I just have to stick to my Routers own stats to get a rough idea :confused:


One of the things I like about Zevvle: stats, stats and more stats!

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Agree that when I had a big data bundle it’s so easy to turn on the various auto upload/download features and not worry about the cost. When the cost of data comes down it does make it less of a worry and easier to gobble up loads of data.

With me not commuting as often, and being smarter with what I do on my commute to use less data, it’s brought my data usage down. Though over time I suspect it will creep up again.

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My Plusnet Mobile PDF bills gave the amount of usage. So rather odd that a big MNO can’t do it.

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My month long experiment is almost coming to its end so I’ll post some more on it soon. Amazing how little data I need in the scheme of things.

My biggest usage has been my Plex Server for music, but I’m starting to keep offline playlists. I now have PocketCasts downloading my Podcasts as they become available so that’s saving a chunk.

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To be honest I could probably use a lot less data than I do :thinking: but that would require me to abandon streaming, which I currently do a lot of when it comes to music.

I would probably drop my bill quite a bit if I downloaded things instead of streamed and stayed on WiFi as much as I could.

Maybe next month i’ll top up a tenner and see if I can get by on £18 when I do this. Right now I’ve had to switch to my O2 SIM though as I was spending £2/day on data

Edit: do any of you know how much data FaceTime/FaceTime Audio uses? :sweat_smile: occurs to me I use that pretty often to talk to my girlfriend so like, I can’t reduce that part of my data usage

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Around 25-30 MB per 10 minutes of call time. Think it’s less than some of the video formats or streaming services around.

That’s going to bankrupt me with Zevvle :joy::joy:

3MB per minute would be 1.5p per minute, which works out half the price of calls. If you are on the phone for ages then yes, I can see how unlimited calls, large data amounts, etc would be useful.

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No phone calls. Already going to have the bailiffs around my house later because I called her on my number itself by accident instead of FaceTime audio :joy::joy: large data amounts definitely appreciated although I suppose I am on WiFi a lot of the time.

And yeah we’re on the phone for quite a while normally, at least 5 hours. With actual FaceTime it’s more 3 hours or so

So the results of my first month of actually monitoring how much data I actually use is in:

Little bit more than I thought it would be to be honest. Plex makes sense because that’s what I use for all my media and I stream quite a lot rather than store it on my phone as I’ve said before. This month I’ll make more use of the 256GB storage on my iPhone!

I didn’t realise how much time I spent on Facebook so maybe I should do something about that! LinkedIn makes sense given my current work climate.

The Harry Potter one is bloody annoying, I literally just opened the app to see what the fuss is about, haven’t actually played it or anything but it looks like despite the app being MASSIVE


It downloads a :poop: ton of crap as soon as you open the app as well! Bit bad when this is aimed at younger people who might not have a huge amount of data. If it uses that much on first launch, I can’t imagine what it’s like in daily use!

The most disappointing one for me is the Monzo app, there’s absolutely no way that it should be using that much data. I use the Monzo and Starling apps equally and it only used 12.4MB.

So there we are, month 1 of me actually tracking my usage!

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I’ve gone the other way and turned data off on my iPhone so I can see exactly what’s using it when out and about. At home I just use WiFi.

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