Mobile data - What can I do with 20GB?

About 20 months ago, I was invited by giffgaff to participate in the 20GB challenge. The goal was to try and use 20GB of mobile data in just one month. In previous months, I have typically used around 4 to 5 GB of data, mainly due to having a fast WiFi connection at home. In an effort to use 20GB, I had to lessen my dependence on WiFi and try to use 4G where I normally wouldn’t.

I measured my daily data usage using a free app called Glasswire, so I could see how much I was using day-to-day, and to see which apps used the most data. For every day of the challenge, I recorded a short diary outlining how I used the data. Are you curious to see if I managed to use up to 20GB in one month? Check out the video below:

Turning off WiFi

At the beginning of the challenge, my initial thoughts on how to try and increase data usage was to turn off WiFi on my smartphone. This resulted in about 100-200MB of daily usage, which is clearly not enough when I’m aiming to use 20GB in one month!

Spotify and social media

My next step was to increase the usage in the apps I already use. For example, in Spotify, I changed the streaming quality to ‘very high’ which more than triples the streaming bitrate compared to ‘normal’ quality. This made a significant difference because I stream a lot of music when I’m travelling. In social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, I turned on video autoplay and image preloading. As you scroll through your feed, images and videos are automatically downloaded, which caused a noticeable increase in my usage for those particular apps.

Streaming video

It soon became clear to me that my regular social media usage and Spotify streaming wasn’t using enough data, so I had to modify my usage to fill the quota. The most significant change was to stream video on my smartphone. I would usually prefer to stream video on a bigger screen such as my laptop, but streaming Netflix and BBC iPlayer on my smartphone allowed me to use more data, so it was a worthy compromise for the challenge.

Tethering to my laptop

While BBC iPlayer used about 1GB of data over one hour, Netflix was only using about 200MB per hour. Ultimately, this is because Netflix heavily compresses video being streamed on a smartphone, which is good for users with a tight data allowance. At this rate, however, it would take almost 100 hours to use 20GB.

In search of an alternative, I found that Netflix on my laptop streams at a significantly higher quality and uses approximately 2GB per hour, which is much more useful! By tethering my laptop to my smartphone’s 4G connection and streaming Netflix at 1080p, I was able to use the remaining 8GB in just 3 days!

The lessons I learned

1. If you’re a lighter data user, having a big 20GB allowance takes away the worry of accidentally hitting your cap and spending extra. You can continue to use 4G and browse to your heart’s content without needing to think about data usage.

2. Having a big allowance reduces your dependence on public WiFi hotspots, such as in cafés and on trains. Using 4G keeps your personal information safe and is often much faster since you’re not sharing the connection with anyone and there isn’t a pesky login portal.

3. On the flipside, having a large allowance might make you want to use more data than you otherwise would, developing unnecessary data usage habits.

4. Furthermore, if you have a large data allowance but you don’t use it all, you might have saved money by buying a smaller package. It’s difficult to estimate your future data usage when you sign a mobile contract, but luckily with giffgaff SIM only plans, you can change your data allowance at any time (phew).

5. If you’re in the habit of travelling around, you will find that having a larger data allowance is very handy. When you’re out and about, a reliable WiFi connection can be hard to get hold of, so simply using 4G takes a weight off your shoulders. Having a reliable internet connection is great because you can keep yourself entertained on long journeys.

6. Lastly, 20GB is a huge amount of data to have on a mobile phone, which makes your 4G connection very versatile. An advantage of having this much data is that you can use the hotspot feature to connect your laptop to the internet when you’re away from home or the office. For example, I used a significant portion of the 20GB watching Netflix on the bigger screen of my laptop without requiring WiFi.

Conclusion

As you could see in this blog, I clearly don’t need 20GB of data per month. The goodybag I’m in at the moment is the giffgaff 8GB for £15. The good thing about being on giffgaff is that I can change my plan whenever I need. giffgaff give us monthly best plan advice, so we don’t have any unused data and don’t waste any money on data we don’t need.

I have found it interesting to have such a large data allowance. While I was tasked with using the entire 20GB allowance, normally you wouldn’t be obliged to use it all, so I feel 20GB provides a nice safeguard if you suddenly find yourself without a WiFi connection (e.g. your home broadband stops working). Furthermore, having a large allowance makes your internet connection more versatile because you can connect your laptop and make use of the fast 4G connection while you’re on the go. It’s up to you. How much data do you need?