How to choose the right tariff? Calculate your mobile data consumption

Do you also use mobile data on a daily basis and are often worried about the lack of data? To choose the best data plan, it's important to find out what your specific mobile data usage is and which tasks consume the most. In this article, we've prepared an overview of the data consumption of each application and activity.

To make it easier for you to choose, we decided to take a thorough measurement and rank all the activities that consume the most data.

For starters, how many MB is 1 GB?

• 1 megabajt (MB) = 1,024 KB
• 1 gigabajt (GB) = 1,024 MB

Which apps and activities cost you the most data?

Our measurements show the following: the biggest data guzzlers are clearly video calls (e.g. via Skype or FaceTime), watching HD videos in high quality (whether on YouTube or Streaming), listening to music (apps like Spotify, Deezer or Google Play), driving with online navigation (i.e. Mapy.cz, Google Maps), downloaded and installed games or apps, visits to websites, posting and chatting (on Facebook, Twitter, etc.), sent and received emails (even without attachments) and messages on WhatsApp and Viber.

You can see the specific figures in the tables below - but the data should be taken as approximate to some extent. There may be slight variations. For example, if you visit a web page with a photo gallery, the data transfer will of course increase dramatically compared to pages with plain text.

For streaming video, the amount of data transferred will in turn be affected by the current connection speed. A slow connection will usually automatically reduce the resolution of the video being played and thus reduce the bitrate. Conversely, when the full speed of the network can be used and the phone can play a high-resolution video stream, the data transferred increases proportionally.

Back to blog