Music is viable too – using Spotify’s normal quality setting you’ll use around 45MB per hour, meaning you could stream for up to around 22 hours per month, or for up to around 35 minutes a day on average. That said, social media apps can use quite a lot more, with just 20 minutes of Facebook use a day potentially using up a 1GB data allowance, based on figures from Wirefly. That’s still not much, but should be fine for lighter users. How much is 1GB of data?ġGB (or 1000MB) is about the minimum data allowance you’re likely to want, as with that you could browse the web and check email for up to around 40 minutes per day. Note that in all cases the figures we give are only estimates, and will vary based on the app/service you’re using or the quality settings when streaming. In this section we'll give you an idea of what you can do overall with popular monthly data allowances available on UK mobile networks. The study doesn’t include figures for 2021, but with the growing availability of 5G and the ever-increasing data demands of modern applications, we’d expect data use will be continuing to grow rapidly. Data use has steadily increased every year included in the report too – with the stats going back to 2013. That’s a 27% increase on the 3.6GB used per month in 2019, which in turns is a 22% increase on the 2.9GB used per month in 2018. The average person used 4.5GB of data per month in 2020, according to Ofcom’s Communications Market Report 2021. How much mobile data does the average person use? These sizes are tiny, with there being eight Mb in one MB, but it’s worth being aware therefore that a Mb is very different to a MB. It’s rarely useful to talk about data in smaller units than megabytes, as even the lowest data allowances are usually hundreds of megabytes, with the majority of allowances being multiple gigabytes.Īlthough not referred to in this article, be aware that there are also megabits (Mb) and Gigabits (Gb). A megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes (KB) or 1,000,000 bytes. Throughout this article we’ll be referring to data primarily in MB (megabytes) and GB (gigabytes). To help you get a handle on how much you might need we’ve covered all the common data-devouring activities, with information on how many precious megabytes they use. But you also don’t want to be paying for unused data, which many people do. Phone calls and texts have taken a back seat to Facebook Messenger, TikTok and WhatsApp, while web browsing, streaming and even working from our phones is something we’re doing more and more of.Īs such, it’s vital that you have enough monthly data. Data allowance is now the most important part of a phone contract.

How many songs is 3gb