It’s never nice to get hit with a big mobile phone bill just because you went over your data plan.
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People generally overestimate how much data they need and that can mean paying more every month than you have to. You can check up on how much data you have been using by referring to your bill or logging into your mobile carrier’s website. You can also use something like Telstra’s 24/7 app to get an estimate of what your data usage is likely during the month.
On an iPhone, you can check your data usage by going to Settings > Cellular and taking a look under Cellular Data Usage. You need to reset the tracker at the start of each month for this to be useful. It might be a good idea to set a reminder, based on your billing period, and you can go to Settings > Cellular and tap Reset Statistics on the relevant day.
On an Android, you can check your data usage and set alerts and limits. Go to Settings and under Wireless & Networks tap on Data usage. You’ll see a table showing your data usage for a specific period of time. You can toggle Set mobile data limit and then move the black and red lines to set an alert usage amount, you will get a warning when you’re getting close to your limit, you can even set it to stop downloading data when you hit your limit. You can also turn off mobile data off whenever you don’t need it.
Use Wi-Fi whenever you are in range. Whenever you’re in the house, or at the office, there’s a good chance you can switch from your mobile data connection to Wi-Fi. Make sure you get into the habit of doing it, and you can make huge savings on the data you’re using. It’s as simple as tapping Wi-Fi in your Settings menu. If you leave Wi-Fi turned on, and you’ve connected to a router before, then it should connect automatically when it comes into range.
Limit background data. One of the main drains on your data is probably going to be background syncing, when an app like Facebook gets an update, or your phone checks to see if there’s any new email on your server. Think about what you actually need updated in real-time.
You can reduce the frequency of push notifications, or just set apps to update manually so they only grab new stuff when you actually open them? This can save you a lot of data, not to mention battery life. You’ll generally need to do it via the Settings menu of the app in question.
