Bandwidth Calculation made easy
It is not easy to know how much bandwidth you will actually need. A lot or a little mean different things to different people and just guessing will most likely end you up with not enough bandwidth or too much and not using it, but paying for it nevertheless. The tool below will allow you to see what the minimum bandwidth requirement is that you would need to perform several activities simultaneously.
Social Media
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are some of the largest social networks in the world. They are a fantastic way of keeping in touch with friends and family, sharing pictures and videos, and discovering news. However, as the networks have grown and the apps have become advanced, they are using up more data than ever on your phone.
Streaming
You will be surprised at how quickly streaming sites such as Netflix and Amazon can eat into your data. How much depends on the video quality.
When you watch a 480p or 720p resolution video on a device, you are using anywhere between 800MBs and 1.3GBs per hour. Moving this up to 1080p, 1440p and even 4K viewing, the amount of data rises to 1.9GB and above every hour.
When using music streaming platforms, such as Spotify or Apple Music, data can also be used up very quickly. While some services offer super-HQ streaming music, most use the same scale: Low, Normal and High.
For low quality, this roughly translates at 43MB per hour, for normal it’s 72MB per hour and for high it’s 115 MB. These are all averages and so are subject to slight changes dependent on your individual usage.
Calculator
For a more detailed insight of your requirements you can use the advanced maritime bandwidth calculator
As a rule, you should expect to see these social media sites use 1.5MB of data per minute if you’re simply scrolling through and reading posts. Once you begin interacting, watching video content or messaging friends, this can increase to 2.6MB per minute. This means that if you spend an hour or more on social media each day, you could use up 2.7GB of data per month.