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How much data will I use?

The amount of data you will use on your phone depends on the type of service you are accessing. These guidelines show the average amount of data used for the most popular Internet on your phone services.

Typical data usage

ServiceUsageAverage data size
TVWatching a 30 min episode of a series90MB
You TubeMusic Video – 4 mins11MB
Radio App10 mins15MB
Facebook15mins with no video streaming5MB
Email100 emails sent/received with no attachment2.5MB
Email with photo or doc attachment10 emails sent/received containing attachment18MB
Web Browsing100 web pages20MB
Web Browsing1 hour26MB
Google Maps10mins6MB

Video streaming

The amount of data used depends on how rich the content is. A 4 minute music video on You Tube uses approx 11MB of data, whereas a 4 minute song on You Tube with a static image will use 7MB.

Radio streaming

Using a app can be quite data intensive. A rule of thumb is that a radio app can use approx 1.5MB of data per minute, in other words 30 minutes of listening to the radio could use on average 45MB

Google maps

10 mins is approx 6MB, however a data plan is advised if you use Google maps regularly because the amount of data you use can vary widely and depends on many different factors such as geographic area of use, zooming, layer toggling, etc.

Facebook

15 minutes of normal usage including looking at photographs and some clicking on links to normal websites is approx 5MB. Please note however that clicking on a link which will bring you to a streaming site such as You Tube increases this substantially.

Email

Reading and replying to 100 emails is about 2.5MB, remember emails with attachments will increase the amount of data used.

Apps and games

Apps and games can vary hugely in size, please check the app store description before downloading for exact details. It is important to remember that many apps continue to use data in the background even if you are not actively using the app.

Music

The amount of data used will depend on the length of the music track and the quality it was produced at, typically these tracks tend to be about 5MB each

Standard web pages

if you're browsing standard web pages which are mostly text, the average page is about 0.1MB. Pages with lots of pictures, flash animation etc will be significantly larger. Amazon's pages contain a lot of images and so the average page is about 0.18MB. BBC pages contain a mix of text and images so the average page is 0.07MB

 

Data usage varies by device and type of content, this information is only a guide to average data usage.