Users can more easily than ever exceed the data allotment on their cellular plan and pay massive overage fees due to increasingly sophisticated smartphones and data-hungry apps. A few years ago, using more than one gigabyte of mobile data would have been practically unheard of. It’s not unusual for apps and their updates to now exceed 100MB in size, and as streaming music and video become more popular, it’s simple to use up all the data limit in a couple of days.
A gigabit of data can be simply and quickly used by streaming an hour of standard definition video content on Netflix or YouTube. The data usage practically triples when the broadcast is upgraded to HD—it uses around three gigabytes of data. If you use Spotify or Google Play Music to stream high-quality music. For that, you will be spending around 120MB of data each hour. At first glance, it might not seem like much, but if you do it for an hour each day for a week, you’ll have 840MB. You reach approximately 3.2GB after an hour per day for a month. If you have a 5GB data plan, you have just used about 65% of it on music.
You could certainly spend more money on a larger plan, but nobody likes to do that? Here are some tips for lowering your data consumption and monitoring it before you spend your hard-earned money.
How to Monitor Data Use
Checking the data usage is a necessary first step. You can’t determine how lightly or seriously you need to change your data consumption habits if you don’t know what your regular usage looks like.
The calculators provided by Sprint, AT&T, or Verizon can help you estimate your data usage, but it’s preferable to actually verify your usage over the last several months.
The simplest way to look at previous data usage is to log into your cellular provider’s website or check the paper invoices and see your data usage. You should get in touch with your service provider and check if you can shift to a less expensive data plan if you frequently go way below your data cap.
Continue reading below if your data usage is approaching or exceeding the cap.
How to limit how much data you use on your Smartphone
Android allows you to view your usage for the most recent month.
- Navigate to Settings and look for Network/ Internet/ SIM. To rapidly access the relevant sub-menu, you can also search Data or Data Saver in the Settings menu.
- Under Internet, tap the Settings button next to the network provider’s name.
- Choose Data warning & limit as you scroll down.
- You can set the length of your data use cycle by tapping on the Mobile data usage cycle.
- To input the data limit, tap the Set data limit option.
Switch data-hungry applications
Some applications load with increased data usage. Fortunately, a number of them have a lighter version and don’t need a quick Internet connection to launch, like Facebook Lite or Instagram Lite. They don’t have all the original version’s features, but they let users perform some basic activities. You can check these smaller programS as needed to help preserve data.
