Data Usage Guide
January 30, 2019 12:44 pmA quick reference for your data usage
This guide gives you a heads up on the common ways that your Internet download is used. We’ve listed approximate data usage for each type in order to help you better track your monthly usage.
Keep an eye out for…
System/App updates on Mobiles, Laptops and Consoles;
These have the potential to use all your data in just hours
Cloud Storage- iCloud, Dropbox and One Drive;
Syncing all your data to the cloud although can be a great back up but can also use massive amounts of data, mostly as uploads. If you have I.E. Dropbox on more than one personal device, all units will sync this data – meaning a 1GB file on three units can turn into 5GB’’ of used data.
Web browsing
Approximately 7GB per month
Census data suggests the average Australian browses the web for around 48 hours per month. An average web page is about 2.5MB in size, which works out to be 7GB around per person, per month.
Sending or receiving a standard email typically uses 25-30kB.
This means that 100 emails would equate to 2.5-3MB. This excludes data used by attachments, which increases the data usage by how big the file is. Email clients such as Gmail, Apple Mail or Outlook will generally tell you the size of your file attachments when you add them.
Approximately 2.5GB per person/month. A lot more if you’re addicted!!
Given how image heavy Facebook is these days, you’ll use slightly more data than you would on most websites. You can expect to use around 2MB per minute, although this can grow if you’re watching lots of video.
The average Facebook user spends about 20 hours on the website each month, meaning you’ll need about 2.5GB of data for each Facebook user in your household.
If you’re hoping to cut down on your Facebook data usage, set videos to “never auto-play” under “Videos and Photos” in the settings menu.
Youtube
From 100MB per hour
YouTube’s data usage will vary depending on the quality you’re watching. A low quality video will use around 1.6MB per minute, but a Full HD (1080p) video will use as much as 12MB per minute.
Some YouTube videos offer higher qualities such as 1440p and 2160p (4K), which will further increase the amount of data you use.
Media streaming
From 0.3 GB to 7GB Per Hour
This depends on the source and what setting you have chosen This table below is a guide to what you could expect per hour of video.
Music streaming
Approximately 150MB per hour
Music streaming data usage will depend on the service you’re subscribed to.
If you’re using the free tier of Spotify on your computer, you’ll only stream at 160kbps, which is roughly equal to 72MB per hour – half the quality (but also half the data usage) you get as a subscriber.
Apple Music only streams 256kps, equivalent to 155MB an hour.
Google Play Music tries to stream at 320kbps, but adjusts depending on the strength of your connection.
If you’ve got a subscription to a lossless music streaming service like Tidal, expect to use around 640MB per hour.
Gaming
As much as 60GB per game download
Playing games online doesn’t necessarily use much data. In most cases, you’re looking at about 50MB per hour, but some can require more.
Downloading and updating games is more taxing on your data allowance. If you’re gaming on Xbox, PlayStation, or PC, new release big budget titles are clocking in at over 60GB in size. Games tend to be smaller on the Nintendo Switch.
Post-release updates aren’t insignificant either, with many amounting to over a gigabyte.
If you’re buying a game online, your digital storefront of choice will almost certainly tell you how big the download is ahead of time, letting you decide when is best to download.
Video calling
Voice and video calling apps like Skype or FaceTime can use a significant amount of data. An hour worth of video calling uses 150 -200MB, while an hour worth of voice would use 30MB.
Voice calling, VoIP, & Wi-Fi calling
WiFi/VOIP calls use approximately 3.8MB of data for a 5 minute call.
This can differ depending on the call codec used
Here are approximate values for data consumption of the most common codecs used for VoIP:
G.711 – 87Kbps
G.729 – 32 Kbps
G.723.1 – 22 Kbps
G.728 – 32 Kbps
What happens if I go over?
Fortunately, there’s no fee if you end up going over your monthly download limit.
For fixed line connections and Satellite, your speed is shaped when you reach your data limit. This means the download speed is slowed down until the end of your monthly billing cycle. It then returns to normal speed at the start of the next month.
Shaped speeds are roughly the speed of an old dial-up internet connection. You can check your email, and browse some websites, but it will be significantly slower.
If you are on a Sky Muster service, you are able to buy data blocks in ‘my account’ if you need extra data.
