Is 25 GB enough for a month?
With 25GB of data, you could stream audio for a very long time each month, though it's unlikely you'd find time to listen to 578 hours of music! Needless to say, you would have more than enough data to browse the internet and social media. You'd also have plenty of room to watch videos too.
A 20GB data plan will allow you to browse the internet for around 240 hours, to stream 4,000 songs or to watch 40 hours of standard-definition video. Nowadays, the key difference between mobile phone price plans is how many gigabytes of data it comes with.
How much mobile data does the average person use? The average person used 5.6GB of data per month in 2021, according to Ofcom's Communications Market Report 2022. That's a 24% increase on the 4.5GB used per month in 2020, which in turns is a 27% increase on the 3.6GB used per month in 2019.
With 30 GB of data you could binge watch about 10 hours of HD quality Netflix films. It all depends on what quality you want to watch it on as well. If you choose to watch your movies in SD then you could watch closer to 30 hours of films. It all depends on what your preferences are though.
To ensure you never run out of data, you'll probably need a monthly data allowance of around 20GB.
Monthly household broadband consumption 2010 to 2022
The monthly average of data consumed by internet users in the same period was 513.8 GB, or over half a terabyte. This is up 11% from the 2021 4th quarter report.
20GB per month is considered to be a fairly large amount of mobile data, alongside 30GB and 50GB. Ofcom's 2021 report claims that most users have an average of 4.5GB of mobile data for the month, so 20GB is definitely above average.
For the above average phone user, 50GB looks to be more than enough to last for a whole month's activity, particularly when you consider that you probably won't need to use your mobile data for that entire time if you have Wi-Fi at home.
What uses the most data on your mobile device? Streaming HD video content is by far the biggest perpetrator when it comes to draining your monthly mobile data allowance, however it's the combination of everything you do your mobile device which adds up to your overall data threshold.
This means you'll use around 2 GB to stream a two-hour SD movie, 6 GB to stream the HD version or 14 GB for the 4K stream. A half-hour TV show would be 500 MB for the SD version, 1.5 GB for the HD version or 3.5 GB for 4K.
How much GB is unlimited data?
Fair usage and unlimited data explained
This means that those networks with fair usage caps on their unlimited plans actually apply a very accommodating usage limit of somewhere between 650GB-1000GB per month.
For most people, 30GB of data will be more than enough to last for an entire month's allowance. When you're out and about, your phone needs to consume data to complete tasks you ask of it, such as browsing the internet or watching videos.
Answer: A Blu-ray disc, for example, can store 25 GB (gigabytes) of data on a single-layer disc and 50 GB on a dual-layer disc. In comparison, a standard CD is the same physical size, but only holds 700 MB (megabytes) of digital data.
In terms of usage, 0-4GB/mo is actually considered light use. Moderate is 5-10 GB/mo, heavy is 11-15 GB/mo, and extremely heavy is over 15GB+ a month.