Unless you spend your time on a computer looking at the sizes of different files, it can be difficult to figure out how much data you can expect to use in a month. But if you’re purchasing a satellite internet plan, that’s exactly what you’ll need.

How many GB does it take to…

Trying to find out how man GB you need on satellite internet doesn’t have to be difficult. Once you have an estimate of how many GB different tasks take, you can figure out how much you’ll need pretty quickly.

Browse the web

Typically, web browsing doesn’t take very much data at all. If you’re watching videos though or browsing social media though, make sure to count that differently. Web browsing takes an average of 60MB per hour, or about 0.06GB.

Browse social media

Social media takes more data on average than typical web browsing, about twice as much. You can expect to use about 120MB or 0.12GB per hour.

Streaming music

Online services that let you listen to music typically use about 150MB (0.15GB) per hour. Keep in mind that downloading the music instead of streaming it will save data if you listen to songs more than once.

Online Gaming

Online gaming uses less than most people think it does. As long as you aren’t streaming the game itself as some services allow, most of the data already exists on your device. Gaming online can use anywhere from 40MB (0.04GB) to 150MB (0.15GB) per hour.

Video calls

This is where the data used per hour takes a big leap. Video calls typically use around a gigabyte (GB) per hour. There’s one more source of data usage though, and it can eat through your data fast if you’re not careful.

Video Streaming

This is by far the largest data consumer, but there are ways to lower it somewhat. Video streaming can use from 1GB to a whopping 7GB per hour. Why the big range? How much data is used in video streaming depends on the quality settings. It takes much more data to stream in 4k than it does to stream at DVD quality (480p). If you want to save data, make sure you have your quality settings turned down.

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