Usually internet providers give you 1 TB (1,000 GB) of data per month, although some providers like Xfinity have been slightly more generous. That's plenty for most people. But exceeding your cap leads to overage fees or throttled speeds. Here's a rundown of how to budget your data and get more data if you need it.
Terabyte FAQs
There are 1,000 GB in a TB. For scale, with a 1 GB plan, you can listen to eight hours of music, watch about an hour and a half of videos or spend about 10-12 hours surfing the internet. What is a terabyte? A terabyte is a measurement of internet data.
As a rough guide, 1GB of data would let you do one of the following: Watch one hour and 20 minutes of video at Standard Definition. Stream roughly eight hours of high quality music (320kbps) Send or receive about 1000 emails.
What is the average mobile data usage? In December 2021, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) reported that the average person on a postpaid contract uses 11.8GB of data each month, while the median data allowance on offer for mobile phone plans sat at 35GB per month.
Plans typically come with anywhere from 10 to 50 GB of data per month. To put all these numbers for rural and urban internet into perspective, the average family of four uses around 190 GB of monthly data.
Most people need around 600 GB of data per month for their home internet connection. That gives you enough data to stream movies, play online games, and participate in video conferencing calls.
The average household consumes 586.7 GB of broadband data per month. 551.4 GB is used on downstream data on average, while 35.3 GB is used on upstream data. 18.7% of broadband subscribers use more than 1 TB of data every month. 26% of broadband users subscribed to gig speeds in 2022, more than double the previous year.
Even 2GB will be cutting it close, so for some breathing room we'd generally suggest at least 3GB. Meanwhile, if you're using mobile data much of the day, every day, or using data intensive things like video streaming and tethering regularly, you'll probably want at least 50GB – and even that might not be enough.
Average internet user in America, 2021 data: The average fixed broadband data usage per person is 149 GB per month (home network, Wi-Fi). The average mobile user data usage is 5.6 GB per month.
Is 100 GB of Data Enough for a Month? 100 GB of data is more than enough for most users. Depending on the activities you do online, how frequently you're connected, and how many people in your household are connected at the same time, 100 GB could be plenty.
Time duration with 1GB*
As you can see, a 1GB bundle is quite small, and doesn't allow you to do a lot each month before it runs out. For reference, there are 720 hours in an average month, so if you watched one hour-long Netflix episode in standard definition, you'd be out of data!
How long will 1gb of data last on Youtube? With 1 GB of data you could watch just over 5 hours of Youtube videos. That is about 70 music videos back to back.
Exactly how quickly you'll burn through it will depend on what you're doing on your phone, with it lasting roughly an hour and a half if you're streaming standard-definition video, around eight hours if you're streaming music, through to several weeks if you're only sending and receiving basic emails.
Audio and video streaming
Streaming, downloading, and watching videos (YouTube, NetFlix, etc.) and downloading or streaming music (Pandora, iTunes, Spotify, etc.) dramatically increases data usage. Video is the biggest culprit.
1 terabyte (TB) equals 1,000 gigabytes (GB) or 1,000,000 megabytes (MB).
Live TV streaming uses about 1.4 GB per hour of HD video. That's more than double the amount of data that streaming movies or music videos use. So, if you're streaming live TV, you can expect to use about 2.8 GB of data per hour.
A lot of apps will quietly run in the background, which can drain your battery and burn lots of mobile data. Consider deleting apps that do this regularly, or (on Android) use some advanced options in Developer Mode to limit background processes.
Be aware of what uses data
High definition video streaming (900MB per hour) Video conferencing, like FaceTime® and Skype® (480MB per hour) Standard-definition video streaming (240MB per hour) Online interactive gaming (60MB per hour)
However, if for some reason you can't access an unlimited data plan (or if you simply don't use enough data to warrant one), a 500GB data plan should do you fine. If you live by yourself or with one other person, you may be able to swing 200GB per month.
300–500 GB per month is typical for a household, especially one that does not use streamed video as its primary video source. 500–1000 GB per month is “high” usage, and typically means that someone is streaming a lot of HD or UHD content.
Streaming Movies or TV
A 1080p HD 60 fps 2-hour movie averages 6 GB in file size. A 1080p HD 30 fps 2-hour movie averages 3 GB in file size. A 720p HD 2-hour movie averages 2 GB in file size. A Standard Definition (SD) 2-hour movie averages 1 GB in file size.
On average, Netflix uses approximately 1GB of data every four hours. This is when Netflix is in its default data usage mode, meant to balance data usage with video quality. So if you do the math (or if we do), that means you can stream approximately 16 hour-long episodes of your favorite show with 4 GB of data.
With your 50GB of data, you'll be able to browse the internet for approximately 600 hours per month, to stream 10,000 songs online or to watch 100 hours of online video in standard definition.