What’s using up all your mobile data?

February 28, 2019

Have you noticed how much data you are going through lately on your mobile phone? We may have the answer, read on to find out how you can save on data.

Apart from the fact that you are probably spending a lot of time on social media and messaging your friends on WhatsApp, chances are that you are also watching videos on YouTube or Netflix and listening to music on Spotify too. Now, these apps are incredible because they give you access to almost limitless content, but when used on-the-go they can quickly eat through large amounts of data. 

Essentially, if you are streaming music and videos on your phone, you are consuming the most data-hungry of content there is. To give you an idea of what we mean by hungry: 

• According to a recent test, an average Netflix TV series episode is about 40-45mins. Each mobile friendly episode is approximately 150MB. Meaning two episodes of your favourite TV show is using about 300MB. 

• With Spotify, the amount of data consumed depends on the music quality setting on the app. A three-minute song on normal uses about 2MB, on high 3.5MB and on extreme it can be as high as 7.5MB. If you are spending an average of two hours a day listening to music you could be using between 80MB to 300MB of data. 

So, if you only have 1GB of mobile data every month, you would have used almost one third of your data in only one to two hours! 

The other thing that might be your using up data are the apps that refresh/update themselves even when you are not using your phone. Commonly known as background data, most apps will have this turned on as a default. The simple fact is not every app always needs to have background data active and you can change this quite easily via the settings on your phone. 

Here are 3 things you can do to help avoid using too much data: 

1. Use Wi-Fi to download music tracks/albums and video. By doing this you will be able to watch and listen offline. See the links below to see how to do this. 

• Watch Netflix TV shows and movies offline 

• Listen to Spotify offline 

1. Decrease the quality of your stream. You don’t have to watch everything in 4K, or HD for that matter, just stream in SD – it won’t make a huge difference when watching on your phone.  

1. Turn off background data.  

• On iPhone: Go to Settings > Tap “General” > Tap “Background App Refresh” > Turn off Background App Refresh entirely or turn off individual apps via the menu beneath. (If you don’t want to switch it off entirely, you can also just switch to the Wi-Fi only option.) 
• On Android: From the start screen, pull down the notification bar for “Settings” > Tap the gear symbol > Tap “Data Usage” under Wireless and Networks > Tap the 3 dots on the top right > Tap “Restrict Background Data” > Tap “OK” to finish (If you want to stop your phone from using any data at all in the background, check the “Restrict Background Data” box in the Data Usage menu. NB: This will stop message and email notifications too until you open the app.) 

See easy! And… another option would be to look at our affordable Mobile Broadband packages, allowing you to connect to the Internet wherever you are. With our Fast Fibre Internet, you get an LTE SIM card with 1 GB of free data each month. 

Contact us or call 087 470 0000 to find out more today.