In an increasingly globalized online world, staying connected has become the holy grail of success. Business nowadays are driven by data and power rests in the hands of those who control data, which is probably why we end up paying too much to mobile carriers for too little. The amount of data you consume has a direct and significant bearing on the charges to your mobile account, watch a youtube video through your smartphone and you may end up paying dearly for the indulgence. Apart from the hefty bills, there is also the issue of reduced internet speeds in so-called unlimited data plans due to high data usage.
Very often we don’t even realize the extent of data usage and end up running needless applications that consume unnecessary bandwidth. Even when the phone screen is off, your smartphone might still be consuming mobile data mainly because of send and receive emails as well as data feeds to your phone applications.
Fortunately there are ways to monitor and reduce mobile data consumption to ensure we are able to make the most optimal use of the data plan and do not end up paying extra for data we did not want in the first place.
Reduce Email data consumption
This is possible in 2 ways.
- Change the phone settings to ensure your smartphone checks for emails only at fixed intervals and not all the time. You can set the frequency of email downloads to as much as every 5 minutes to every hour or even every 6 hours.
- Change the settings on your phone to ensure there is no automatic download of entire emails with attachments and hence reduce mobile data consumption. Instead choose setting which allow only the first few kilobytes to be downloaded. This way you can decide based on the mail contents whether you want the entire email along with attachments to be downloaded onto your smartphone.
Reduce usage through data feeds
Data feeds essentially refer to real time updates to your phone to any application on your phone. It could be updates to your social media page on Facebook, Linked or Twitter or even updates on the latest news to your news app. Activating data feeds means your smartphone continues to check and receive data feeds to these applications even when it is not being actively used using up mobile data unnecessarily, which is why it is best to keep data feeds in off mode.
Use WiFi for downloads to the extent possible
Mobile applications come in all shapes and sizes, some use negligible bandwidth, others can use up your entire data plan. Even downloading songs to build a collection can use up bandwidth, though we may not realize it. It is always more preferred to download mobile applications, whether it is podcasts games, music, use your home wireless network rather than mobile data plan to avoid excessive charges.
Use mobile friendly websites
Mobile friendly sites are optimized for performance on mobile phones and consume much lesser bandwidth while loading than sites that have not been optimized for smartphones.
There are a host of apps that make it possible to monitor mobile data usage to inform you which apps are consuming the most data to help you make the most efficient use of your data plan and hence reducing mobile data consumption.