Make the most of your mobile data

Britain’s mobile data tariffs are among the lowest in the world. According to an OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) study published in July 2013, only Australia’s are cheaper.

All the same, committing to a large monthly data allowance can still rack up costs over the course of a two-year contract. And if you opt for a smaller cap, then use up your whole allowance during any given month, you’ll be charged extra for additional “out-of-bundle” usage. If you can keep your data usage within reasonable limits, you can save real money.

How much data do you get, and how much do you need?

Before you worry about reducing your data usage, start by working out whether you actually need to. If you don’t know your monthly data allowance, you can normally check it on your provider’s website, or by giving them a call.

Getting the measure of how much data you actually use involves a bit more work: your month-to-month usage should be detailed on your bills, but the precise figure will naturally vary from one period to the next. Digging back several months will give you a good idea of your average usage – and whether it’s stable or gradually creeping upwards.

Once you know this, you can start making informed choices. It may be that you don’t need to reduce your usage: if you have a 500MB monthly bundle but use only 200MB in a typical month, there’s nothing to be gained by cutting back.

It might be worth contacting your provider to see if you can save money by moving down to a 250MB allowance: even if you occasionally go over the lower limit, you may well end up saving money overall.

For most of us, however, it’s more likely that we’ll be close to our data threshold, with consumption gradually growing as everyday services move online. Most providers will help you avoid going over your cap by sending you a text message when you’re getting close – but when a message such as this arrives, it’s too late to do anything other than pare your usage right back for the remainder of your billing period.

Tracking your usage

One way to keep track of your usage is by logging on to your provider’s website every week or two and checking how much of your allowance remains. Some providers – including EE and Vodafone – offer their own apps for iOS and Android that can give you a running tally. You don’t need these, however: almost all phones (and 3G/LTE-equipped tablets) come with built-in software to track activity on mobile networks.

This approach comes with a caveat, since on-device records may not precisely square with what your provider thinks you’ve used. This can happen, for example, if you’re in an area of poor coverage and your device is having multiple tries at sending and receiving data packets.

It’s conceivable that you could end up being charged for exceeding your limit even if your data monitor thinks you’ve stayed just within it. So it’s still a good idea to drop by your provider’s website every so often, to check whether its records have drifted significantly apart from yours.

Android users will find the data-monitoring tool under Settings | Data Usage. It shows a graphical representation of how much mobile data you’ve consumed in any given month – tap the “Data usage cycle” dropdown to tell it the date on which your billing period starts – and if you scroll down, you’ll see a breakdown by app.
Android also warns you when you pass a certain data-usage threshold. By default, it’s set at an unhelpfully high 2GB, so most people will never see it, but if you tap the “2.0GB warning” text you can change it to something more useful.

If you’re really allergic to crossing the line, you can also tick “Set mobile data limit” to automatically disable all mobile data communications once you pass a specified monthly threshold. Remember to account for the possibility of your mobile provider thinking you’ve used more data than your phone has recorded.

Windows Phone offers a similar tool, called Data Sense. You’ll find it in the App list: tap the Settings button within the app to set up your monthly billing period and your data limit.

A tickbox lets you “Restrict background data when I’m near my limit” – so that things such as Live Tile updates and email updates are suspended automatically. Data Sense doesn’t alert you when you get close to your limit, but you can pin its tile to your Start screen to see a running total of how much mobile (and wireless) data you’ve used in your current period.

For iPhone and iPad users, iOS 7 keeps a record of your data usage in Settings | Mobile. Within this menu you’ll see a headline total of data used, plus, if you scroll down, a breakdown of how your various apps have contributed to that total. Tap on “System services” to see how much data things such as Siri and Find My iPhone have used.

Unfortunately, iOS 7 has no facility for warning you when your data usage passes a certain threshold.

In fact, it doesn’t keep track of your billing cycle at all: if you want to measure your monthly data usage, you’ll have to come back every month and hit the “Reset statistics” button at the bottom of the Settings page.

You may therefore choose to install a third-party app that provides that function. In addition to the various providers’ own-brand offerings, there are plenty of options in the App Store. One popular choice for iOS is My Data Manager. This lets you set custom alerts – so you can, for example, receive a notification when you’ve used 33% of your data allowance, then again when you hit 66% – so you don’t get any sudden shocks.

The software is available for Android too, but Windows Phone 8 users are left out: the API doesn’t allow a third-party app to monitor other app’s network connections, so it isn’t possible to create a usage-monitoring tool on this platform.

Use Wi-Fi where possible

It’s sensible to try to minimise your data usage, but naturally you don’t want to give up the features and conveniences of your smartphone. The simplest way to reduce your mobile data usage, without changing your habits, is to use Wi-Fi instead wherever possible.

Set up your phone to connect whenever it’s in range – not only at home, but if possible then also at work and at the homes of friends and family members.

It might be going a bit far to insist on logging on every time you visit a café or pub, but if you want to download an attachment, or to spend a quiet ten minutes surfing the web over a cup of coffee, it’s worth checking to see if there’s a wireless network over which you can do it for free.

Also check whether you’re entitled to use paid-for hotspots. BT Broadband customers, for example, receive free access to hundreds of BT hotspots across the country, while a Sky Broadband subscription includes free access to hotspots operated by The Cloud. Londoners should consider signing up for Virgin Media’s Wi-Fi service on the tube: it’s free if you’re with EE, Virgin Mobile, O2 or Vodafone.

Reducing the data drain

While you’re using mobile data, there are some simple steps you can take to cut data usage without degrading your experience. One is to use native apps rather than web services wherever possible. The overhead of downloading a graphics-heavy page, and all its client-side code, every time you load a page can be significant – see Apps vs websites, below.

If an app isn’t available, the next best thing is to make sure you’re browsing mobile websites where possible. In most cases, where a service offers both desktop and mobile-friendly interfaces, they’ll detect that you’re coming from a smartphone and automatically route you to the lightweight site, so this won’t normally be a problem – but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

One place where it may be a good idea not to spare your data is when it comes to sharing images with friends. The cost of sending a photo via MMS is typically 20p or more, depending on your network provider.

If you can instead share the image via email or Twitter, the effective cost is zero – so long as it doesn’t push you over your cap. Avoid emailing full-resolution images if you don’t need to: the JPEGs from a 13-megapixel phone camera can weigh in at more than 2MB apiece. Instead, use an app such as Facebook and Twitter, which will automatically reduce the resolution and compress your pictures down to around 100KB each.

You can also install a browser that’s designed to minimise mobile data usage. The Opera mobile browser, available for Android and iOS, features an optional “Off-Road” mode, which routes pages through a proxy server that compresses online data and images before they’re sent to your phone.

The developer claims that this can reduce data usage by 90% while browsing, and since pages are smaller, they load more quickly, too. A similar feature is offered by Chrome for Mobile: you can activate it by visiting Settings | Bandwidth Management | Reduce data usage.

Needless to say, using a proxy in this way has some privacy implications – but in Chrome, HTTPS connections bypass the proxy and go straight to the original server. That may be a reason to choose it over Opera Mini, which doesn’t currently support end-to-end encryption.

One final but controversial way to cut your data usage while browsing is to install an ad-blocking app. Not everyone agrees with using this type of software, since it reduces a website’s ability to make money from visitors.

You may also need to root your Android phone, or jailbreak your iPhone to make it work (at present there’s no way to block ads on Windows Phone). If you can live with that, however, blocking popular ad providers will reduce the amount of data you download as you browse around the web.

Data-saving compromises

If you really need to dial back your data usage, there are certain activities you’ll just have to avoid. An obvious place to start is streaming: YouTube videos can eat up around 3MB per minute.

If you use the Spotify app, check your quality settings – the “Extreme” setting will download 320Kbits/sec streams representing around 7MB for a three-minute pop song; slash this by choosing “High quality”, which halves the bit rate to 160Kbits/sec, or “Normal quality”, which drops it to 96Kbits/sec. You can also set Spotify to use offline playlists only, so you can listen to local music without having to pull any songs in over the air at all.
It’s a good idea to avoid downloading apps over mobile data, too, and to check that your phone isn’t set to automatically pull updates over the expensive airwaves.

If you’re going on a journey, plan your route beforehand. In our test, spending a mere two minutes picking out a route in Google Maps on Android gobbled up 4MB of data, so it’s best to do this on Wi-Fi before you set off. You can temporarily cache the area by tapping the magnifying glass icon, then scrolling to the bottom of the menu and tapping “Make this map area available offline”. For iOS users, Apple Maps automatically caches nearby map data.

If you’re really up against the wall in terms of data usage, consider temporarily turning off automatic syncing for tasks such as email and Facebook.

In Android, you’ll find the option tucked away in the menu options of the Data Usage tool, and it’s also possible to restrict background data completely – though this will prevent services such as Calendar and Google Play notifications and installations from working properly.

On iOS 7, you’ll want to go into General | Background App Refresh and either turn off the feature entirely, or selectively disable it for specific apps. For Windows Phone users, automatic syncing is automatically disabled when Battery Saver mode is activated, and Live Tiles will stop receiving push notifications.

One last point worth making is to use mobile hotspot functions with care. There’s nothing inherently wrong with sharing your mobile phone’s data connection with other devices, but those other devices will see the connection as a regular wireless network, and may therefore assume it can be used for data-heavy operations such as downloading app updates.

If you’re connecting from a Windows 8 tablet or laptop, you can set the connection to “metered” to stop the OS from automatically downloading Windows updates, syncing SkyDrive files and updating Live Tiles on the Start screen. You can do this by going into the PC Settings screen, then tapping Network | Connections and clicking the appropriate switch.

App updates

Both Android and iOS 7 automatically download and install updates to your installed apps as they become available. By default, they’ll do this only over a Wi-Fi connection, so you shouldn’t get any nasty shocks when a 100MB update for the latest game comes down the line.

It’s possible to change this behaviour, however, to allow a mobile data connection to be used. On Android, you’ll find the option in the Google Play app, under Settings. In iOS, the “Use Mobile Data” option can be found under Settings | iTunes & App Store. With this enabled, software updates will be downloaded by your phone as soon as they become available, even if you’re using a mobile connection at the time.

Clearly this is a good way to gobble up data in rapid, unpredictable chunks – so we don’t recommend it, unless you have a very generous data allowance indeed.

If you do feel the need to update an app while you’re away from a wireless connection, it’s much more efficient to update only the app in question. On both Android and iOS, you can open the relevant interface – be it Google Play or the App Store front-end – and hit Update on an individual app to perform a one-time update over your mobile data connection.

Apps vs websites

To see what a difference apps can make, we tried using some popular web services on a smartphone, first via their web interfaces, and then using the official Android apps. We carried out the same operations in each, and, using Android’s built-in Data Usage monitor, tracked how much data was exchanged in the process.
Here’s what we did: On eBay we searched for a specific item, waited for the results page to load, then clicked on the first result returned and clicked through to view a detailed description. On HungryHouse we searched for the nearest pizza restaurant and added a margherita pizza to our basket for delivery to a home address.

Then, on Twitter we loaded the timeline, switched to the Connect view to see all our replies and retweets, then posted a test tweet. On Facebook we loaded the timeline, then tapped on a recent update and viewed all comments. Finally, on Amazon we searched for a specific item, waited for the results to load, then clicked on the first one returned and clicked through to view a detailed description.

As you can see, using native apps almost always resulted in a far more efficient experience – the one exception being Amazon, whose mobile website is already ruthlessly optimised to minimise bandwidth demands. The biggest individual winner was our image-heavy eBay search, but the Twitter and HungryHouse apps together saved us a further 4.3MB in a matter of moments.

It’s clear that using native apps is a no-brainer. Indeed, most of these apps weigh in at less than 10MB – the one exception being the 16MB Facebook app – so even if you’re away from a wireless network, it may make more sense to download an app over your mobile connection than to carry on using the web interface. If you’re not in a hurry, it’s best to wait until you’re on Wi-Fi, then load up on all the apps you think you may need in the future.