15 GB could last you quite a long time. Or it could be gone in an afternoon. It largely depends on what you use your mobile hotspot for. Browsing, streaming music, streaming video, and chatting online will all use your data at different rates. An hour on Facebook isn’t going to show the same impact on your data as an hour on YouTube. Let’s take a closer look.

The activity with one of the lowest data costs is going to be browsing a web page, for example browsing through social media. Opening up a typical web page uses about 2MB of data. That’s not a lot. With 15 GB of data, you could open over 7,500 web pages. But as soon as you start downloading content or listening to music or streaming videos on that social media page, you start to use a lot more data. Music streaming certainly uses a lot more than opening a webpage, but it’s still not too bad. Streaming music on Spotify for one hour for example might cost you about 100 MB, depending on the quality of the music you choose. At that rate, you could stream for 150 hours without going over your 15GB. That comes in roughly at 5 hours a day, which is pretty good. But video streaming is where your data allowance begins to squirm a little. Streaming YouTube or Netflix at the low quality of 240p, you will use around 200 MB per hour (or more). Up this quality to 1080p and that data usage goes up to 1.5 to 3 GB per hour or more. Stream in high quality and you’ll find your 15 GB gone in a few hours. Keeping a close eye on your data usage and conserving it by using less data-demanding settings will help your data allowance last much longer.