The Data Bundle You Need To Take Through Your Day

Smartphones are the second most popular devices used to search the web/internet and to do so, we need any kind of internet connections, whether Wireless or Mobile Data.

Let’s talk about Mobile Data Connections and narrow it down to the daily data bundles, when we load daily data, at times we find out that it wasn’t enough or perhaps it never did what you had wanted to do.  So the question comes up, What data bundle can I load on phone for daily usage?

You might purchase data that is simply going to be chewed in matter of seconds, this might be because, you’re using/opening apps that consume more that 2Mbs of data per minute or you might be uploading/download heavy media and so forth.

In this article, we shall basically show you what data bundle you might need for the day and how you can spend your data minimizing it to the fullest. You might have been running some apps, that take a lot of data when you didn’t have any idea at all.

Study shows at-least 90% of the time people spend on their smartphones is on “Apps” and on an estimation, 60% of Ugandans have access to these smartphones. This translates, to more than 20 million Ugandans connected to different mobile telecommunication networks.

So how is your data spent in the day-to-day usage, — this is how; (this is based on estimations)

Email (Approximately 50Kbs per message):
Emails use a tiny amount of data. Even if you’re a big-time emailer that sends dozens per day and has your phone set to automatically refresh your inbox every half an hour you should be totally fine.

Uploading Photos (Approximately 1.5Mbs per photo):
The size of your upload depends entirely on the photo itself and on the service you’re using. If for instance your camera takes 8-megapixel photos, then you’ll be using about 1.5MB to upload each pic to the web, assuming you’re uploading it at full resolution.

In other-words, the higher the image resolution or the more detailed the photo, the bigger the file size.

Web Surfing (About 2.5Mbs per minute):
General web browsing on your phone will often result in variable data usage, going as low as 1MB per minute up to around 4MB+. It noramlly depends on what sites you frequent visit and how pages you view, because each page of a site loads separately.

At 2.5MB per minute you’ll hit 1GB in under 8 hours, so try to use WiFi or your home computer if you’re a habitual web-surfer.

Streaming Music (About 1-2 Mbs per minute):
Most music streaming services, like Spotify, Apple music, Google Play music, Pandora, and so forth use around 1-2MB per minute for standard sound quality. That’s not too much, except that this rate holds constant for the entire time that the music keeps playing.

YouTube (About 2-6 Mbs per minute):
Streaming video is one of the biggest data killers you can ever have. Taking the average of several YouTube videos, Standard Definition (SD) takes up between 2-3MB per minute and High Def (HD) went as high as 6MB per minute on a 720p display.

6MB might not sound like much, but it adds up. If you have a small 200MB plan then you’ll use up the whole thing in under half an hour watching YouTube in HD. Try to stick to SD and avoid watching video if you’re getting close to your data limit, or didn’t have a big one to begin with.

Social Media Platforms:

Whatsapp:

1. Sending a message = 13.3Kbs and Receiving = 7.4Kbs.
2. Sending a video message = “Depends on the size of video you’re sending”.
3. Whatsapp Calls = 1.3Mbs per minute–whether receiving or calling.

Facebook:

1. Sending messages = 20.1Kbs and Receiving = 17Kbs.
2. Watching video clips = 1.2Mbs per minute.
3. Updating your status = 700Kbs.

SnapChat:

1. Sending messages = 20.1Kbs and Receiving = 17.3kbs.
2. Sending a picture message = 13.0 Kbs (5 seconds) and Receiving = 867 Kb (10 seconds).
3. Sending a video message = 1.9 Mbs (10 seconds) and Receiving = 891 KB (10 seconds).

Twitter:

1. Sending/Posting 1 tweet (140 Characters) = 200 bytes.

Instagram

1. Uploading a photo = About 2Mbs per photo, although this varies with what kind of camera your phone has, how many mega-pixels the images from your phone are.
2. Watching a clip/video = About 4Mbs for 15 seconds.

Winning Data Plan:
I guess, we’ve now come a conclusion, 100Mbs is the right choice one could spend on data if s/he wants to surf, download, upload, social chat and more.

So what if you felt like not purchasing the 100Mb data plan, but you want to know which data plan is right for you aside from the 100Mbs. So What will you do? This will give you a thousand questions…. like, how do you know what data is enough to take me through the day or how much data is too much or too little?

Data calculators have this covered for you, telecom companies such as MTN, Vodafone, Airtel have these calculators. MTN Data Calculator, Vodafone Data Calculator, Airtel Data Calculator add up your selections in real time and gives you an idea of what data is enough/right for you.

They give you an approximate figure for data usage based on the average size of emails, downloads, uploads, webpages opened, Social Media activities, streaming’s and Mobile Apps activities and so forth.

Try out these data calculators in case you need to know which data plan you might need to use.

Summary of the data plan with the Uganda telecom companies: