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Comment by SRTP | Hacker News Reader

I live in Singapore and estimate my monthly data usage is around 20 GB / mo.

I pay about 15 USD/mo.

Do you stream a lot of video or something? I can't figure out how people reach these figures. I mainly use my phone for Web browsing, podcasts (mostly downloaded at home), and chatting, and never remotely get close to these figures.

The way you exceed 10-20+ gb a month is by being so used to having such a high cap if any that you don’t even bother to turn on the WiFi when you’re at home.

I too live in Singapore and the internet infrastructure is excellent. Currently I’m sitting at about 10gb/month on 4g without YouTube/Netflix/social media. I do use a fair amount of Reddit though. I don’t really want to go back to having to care about how much data I’m using.

That makes sense. My Internet connection and especially WiFi (yay Unifi!) at home are quite great though, whereas cell reception in my apartment building is quite spotty, so WiFi is the obvious no-brainer choice for when I'm at home. And these days most of my phone usage happens at home because of WFH, so yeah, not much mobile data consumption. Even before then though there wasn't much; I don't tend to watch streaming video when I'm out and about.

I never exceeded 1GB of mobile data, personal and work combined, literally ever. But I can totally understand how one reaches these figures without doing anything weird: video call meetings, video streaming while commuting or traveling, music streaming throughout the day, maybe also work via tethering when not in the office or at home... it's just that one can choose to not do these things.

On the one hand, I feel like I'm preaching and practicing abstinence by doing things like downloading videos that I want to watch in the bus ahead of time over WiFi. On the other, long-range mobile data only works because we're not all using it at the same time, that's why we we meter it per month: it's a poor man's way of limiting concurrent usage while allowing bursty traffic and keeping the limits understandable to consumers. If you use a lot of data or need a lot of bandwidth reliably (e.g. IT company), running a local network yourself is the obvious way to go today. But with small cells coming to a bus stop near you, and seeing just how easy mobile data is compared to WiFi that can be out of range more easily (or you may be connected to a faraway access point), can be down and nobody is on call to fix it (in a company, someone might be on call for WiFi, but at home?), etc., it seems clear that for 98-99% of people and 90-95% of companies, using mobile data exclusively is the medium-term future (let's say around 2040).

And if it is the future, and since I use anywhere between 50GB and 2TB per month in data on my home internet connection (not counting others in the house), mobile data will need to handle such figures per person as well. More, even, because it will be in the future.

Someone having a 20GB+ mobile data plan is not exactly weird to me, even if with a little bit of foresight you can limit your usage to 1-2GB a month (and that still allows for quite a bit of video calling and occasional videos on the go) and save a bunch of money in 2020 (something on the order of subscribing to both netflix and spotify premium).

IG killed a gb for my cousin in about 2 days. How have you not done this? Streaming not required. We checked it before and after setting the save bandwidth option. It did 100mb in maybe 10mins of scrolling

I use around 15 GB/mo out of my 60 GB/mo plan

Looking at my mobile data usage (which hasn't been reset since August), the top apps are 5 GB YouTube, 3 GB iOS system services (mainly document sync), 2.5 GB tethering, 1 GB photos app, 1.5 GB Twitter, 800 MB LINE messenger, 800 MB App Store, 600 MB music, 500 MB Safari, 500 MB Instagram, 350 MB Podcasts, etc etc

Being fairly active on social media; especially GIF or video heavy websites will see you churn through 1-2gb a day easily.

There are also clients that can just download those gifs while you're on WiFi for later consumption.

I'm not saying you should do this, just that it's also quite easy to save 90% of your data usage without reducing media consumption if you are so inclined.

Just watching one movie or ~2h sports game in a hotel with crappy wifi (so you use your 4G) in HD, will eat quite a bit of data. Same if you watch netflix during a 2x30 minute commute every day.

Obviously if you don't watch video it's extremely hard to get close to these bandwidhs on a smartphone.

I mean, if you're catching the train or bus, is it that unusual to want to watch a few YT videos or a 25-60 minute episode on a streaming service? I suspect most people who avoid it are doing it for data reasons.

> is it that unusual to want to watch a few YT videos or a 25-60 minute episode on a streaming service?

To want it perhaps not, but do you see people do this around you? I've seen more people gaming (laptop and mouse) on a train than people watching streaming video on the train. There have been more people that watched videos but when they pause for the conductor it's virtually always VLC or WMP, revealing that it's pre-downloaded. (I know VLC can do streaming but I'd have seen buffering here and there and they're much more likely to use the service's own client because of DRM.)

So while I don't say it's weird to have that desire (it would certainly be easier not to have to plan this ahead), yes, it is unusual in the Netherlands. And now that I live in Germany I'd say it's not just unusual but impossible, given their mobile data network coverage.

>I've seen more people gaming (laptop and mouse) on a train than people watching streaming video on the train

My experience has been different. Sydney, Australia for reference - our data costs are relatively low at about 0.68 USD per GB (down from 1 USD or so last year if I were to guess). When I've looked around on packed trains in the past, about a third of the occupants were watching YouTube or Netflix (very rough estimate). Although obviously this strongly depends on where you are - for instance, when I was living in Japan, most people would be either playing games or reading news.

>revealing that it's pre-downloaded

Sure, but is because that's the way the prefer it, or is it a workaround that they've resorted to due to high data costs? Behaviour is a symptom of circumstance just as much as it is of desire, if that makes sense.

The argument I'm trying to make is that it's not that it's not that there's no demand, it's that the low supply results in people pursuing lower cost/higher effort alternatives.

Edit: But I'm not trying to say you're wrong. It's definitely interesting to hear what happens in the Netherlands and Germany. I appreciate your input.

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