Broadband usage guide: how much data do you need?
Summary: How much broadband will you use and what size plan do you need? We take a look at
common online services and pass-times.
With advances in online technology and the introduction of new streaming TV services, there has never been a
better time to get up to speed on how much data you and your family use each month. Right-sizing your
broadband plan can save you money and spare you from annoying periods without the web after you run out of
data within a month.
Some online activities require almost no data
across your month, others can use hundreds or thousands of times more. It's important to understand your
usage habits so that you don't end up paying for a bigger plan than you need.
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Email
Web Surfing
Facebook
Skype
Online Gaming
YouTube
Streaming TV
Downloading
Movies & TV
General web browsing and email
"Web surfing" covers a lot of online activity. Broadly speaking, you can easily use around 2.5MB per minute
when browsing on a laptop or desktop.
The average Australian spends around 48 hours browsing the web per month or about 7GB per month
per person in your household.
Email (sending and receiving) uses up negligible amounts of data and is fine on any plan. Obviously you will
use more data if you are trading large file attachments, like pictures and videos.
Be sure to check the size of any attachment and make note of how regularly you receive them. Make sure it's
something you would normally receive from a contact you trust. Blindly clicking on file attachments is a good
way to get your computer infected with malware.
Netflix and other streaming TV services
Streaming TV services are similar to YouTube in how much data they use per minute, but will probably end up
using a whole lot more data over the course of a month because of the average length of content on offer. Just
think of how likely you are to watch 2 hours of YouTube per night versus your favourite movies or TV shows.
We've already got a detailed article covering how much data each month you're likely to need for Netflix and
similar services, the basic gist of which is: a lot.
Standard Definition (SD) viewing expect around 36GB per month. For High Definition (HD) streaming
expect around 156GB per month.
Be aware that unless you fiddle with the settings, Netflix will automatically choose the resolution of the stream
based on the speed of your connection, and it will continue to tweak the connection through the stream for best
results.
If you don't use Netflix but do use another service like Presto, Stan or Fetch TV, the figures will be similar.
How can I control how much data Netflix uses?
Watching movies or TV shows on Netflix uses about 1 GB of data per hour for each stream of
standard definition video, and up to 3 GB per hour for each stream of HD video. This can create
headaches for Netflix members who have a monthly bandwidth or data cap on their Internet service.
Below, you'll find a few ways to reduce the amount of data Netflix uses, without having to resort to
drastic measures (like actually watching less Netflix).
Adjust your data usage settings
Adjusting the data usage settings for your account is the easiest way to reduce the amount of
bandwidth used while watching Netflix. There are four data usage settings to choose from. Each
estimate below is per stream:
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Low (0.3 GB per hour)
Medium (SD: 0.7 GB per hour)
High (Best video quality, up to 3 GB per hour for HD and 7 GB per hour for Ultra HD)
Auto (Adjusts automatically to deliver the highest possible quality, based on your current
Internet connection speed)
To select a setting that works best for your Internet plan, navigate to the Your Account page and
select Playback settings in the Your Profile section. It can take up to 8 hours for these changes to
take effect. Restricting data usage may effect video quality while watching Netflix.
Data usage settings only apply to the Netflix profile you are in when you set them, meaning you can
have different data usage settings for each profile. If you are concerned about the total amount of
data that Netflix uses, make sure to change this setting for each profile.
Renting movies & TV shows
Renting movies and TV shows through services like iTunes, BigPond Movies and Xbox Movies can be a huge
hit to any download cap. Often, you will be given the size of the file in the product description, and you might
be surprised how much data you'll spend on a single title.
A standard length movie on iTunes requires 4GB for a HD file and about 1.5GB for a SD copy. TV
shows about 1.5GB for HD and 800MB for SD.
It is pretty much the same across all online video stores, so you will want to keep this in mind before you buy
or rent.
Facebook & social media
Social media is totally fine if you're on a decent-sized cap of 20GB or up, but on those smaller ones it can use a
surprising chunk.
During the course of casual Facebook browsing – chatting, browsing photos, status checking and clicking a
few links – slightly under 2MB of data was consumed per minute.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claims the average US user spends around 40 minutes per day on the
service. Do the math and it works out to around 20 hours per month.
At 2MB per minute that amounts to around 2GB per month per Facebook user.
If you have kids it stacks up. Two teenagers would be using a good 4GB per month just with Facebook,
assuming that they were only average users.
YouTube
A common misconception about video streaming is that it doesn’t use up as much data as downloading the
same video would. In fact, it uses about the same amount of data.
You often end up using more. When streaming a video, the file buffers ahead of time. This is the segment of
the film that you have downloaded.
Unfortunately, if you refresh the page, or close it down and come back later to re-watch it, chances are you'll
have to download it all over again.
We logged how much data YouTube uses for a 5 minute video, using the more common resolutions.
Here is a table of the speed at which each video downloaded, as well as the amount uploaded per second and
the final amount of data that had been downloaded.
YouTube Usage
240p
360p
480p
720p
1080p
Bits per second (down)
400-500Kb
900Kb-1Mb
1.5-1.7Mb
20Mb
20Mb
Bits per second (up)
5-9Kb
15-20Kb
20-26Kb
320Kb
320Kb
Data used in 5 minutes
8.3MB
13.3MB
20MB
37.5MB
62MB
For every 5 minutes of 720p video footage on YouTube you're using up around 37.5MB of data.
In 2012, the average YouTube viewer watched 6 hours of video per month. YouTube has since stopped
publishing this statistic, but does claim that the number of hours watched by users goes up by 50% annually.
At 720p that long-surpassed 6 hours would have come to around 2.7GB of usage. This is a drop in the ocean
for a big 100GB cap, but something smaller like a wireless 3G or 4G plan it can be devastating.
It also goes beyond YouTube. Videos are embedded in everything from online newspapers to review sites and
even Facebook. It all adds up, so be mindful if you have a limited cap when it comes to video content.
Online gaming
Gaming is a hugely variable set of data. Depending on what game you are playing your usage will change, but
it's all still relatively low. If your parents start blaming your gaming for going over the cap, don't turn around
and tell them they're wrong. In fact, you may be more of a culprit than you imagine.
Some popular titles only use around 20-25KB/s putting them at around the 1.5MB per minute mark -- similar
to Facebook and regular internet browsing.
Conversely, it can be much less. StarCraft II, a popular strategy game, used around 1.5KB/s on average ingame when it came out. It would take almost 200 hours of in-game play to approach 1GB.
The biggest consideration these days is for those of us who buy games through online stores and download the
game files. These files can be 50GB or more, meaning a single new game could wipe out a family's internet
for the month if on a modest data plan.
Skype and VoIP
Skype and other VoIP clients have changed the way we make international voice and video calls. It's also very
easy on your data cap.
A standard voice call on Skype only uses about 360KB per minute. You would need about 48 hours of
straight voice calls per month to approach just 1GB.
Video calls use more and it varies largely depending on the quality of the image being sent. It's very close to
YouTube and other video streaming services in this respect, around 40MB every 5 minutes, or half a GB per
hour. Most webcams are quite a bit under this, however.
Compare high speed cable and NBN plans
Bits & Bytes
The speed at which your internet connection operates is measured using a different standard than the size of
the information being transferred. It's as if we used kilometres per hour to measure speed, but only measured
the distance traveled in miles. It's dumb, but that's what we have to work with.
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Bits: a bit is commonly used to measure connection or download
speeds. The symbol for a bit is a lower-case 'b'. This is the same for
megabits (Mb), gigabits (Gb) and other larger bit measurements.
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Bytes: a byte is 8x larger than a bit. It is commonly used to measure
the size of a file. The symbol for a byte is an upper-case 'B'. The
same is true for megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), etc.
When downloading a file, the speed is usually displayed thus: '168.2Kb/s'. In this example you downloading
something at 168.2 Kilobits per second.
If you want to keep track of your usage when downloading, ignore the speed when it comes to judging how
much data you are using. The important information is the size of the file being downloaded. This is what will
affect your cap.
Uploading counts as usage
Everyone knows what a download is and that it uses up your cap. Uploading - the reverse of downloading does it as well.
Uploading is the information being sent out of your computer and off in to the never-ending ether of the
internet.
Uploading used to be unmetered by ISPs, which means that it didn't count towards your usage, but this is no
longer that common.
You will almost always be uploading while doing anything online. This is usually ok. Most uploading is done
at a significantly smaller rate than downloads. However, if you use online cloud storage like DropBox or
iCloud, or if you're a fan of file-swapping, then it can be an important factor. Be just as mindful of your
uploads as your downloads.