Connect with us

General

RECESSION: How to lower cost on data

Published




Everyone wants to save cost now. Many are doing away with excesses while are trying to get more streams of income to maintain a status quo.

Whatever you choose to do, you can’t cut away communication. That means you need data on your devices constantly. Yet, if you are not careful, you may end up spending more than you have budgeted on the invisible commodity.

What can be done in this case? Not to worry. Here are five things you need to do to lower your data cost and consumption.

1. Watch out! Those free texting apps are not really free

Many times, the text messages you think are free might actually be draining your data. Whether you use Apple iMessage, Google Hangouts or a third-party app like Imo or WhatsApp, texting applications have the potential to consume a lot of data. If you’re sending only text-based messages, you have little to worry about—but you’re going to burn a lot of data texting pictures and videos.

2. Don’t let those social media videos auto-play

If you have Facebook, Instagram or Twitter on your phone, you may be using more data than you realize. If a friend posts a video in their newsfeed, you may notice it sometimes plays automatically when you scroll past it. Those videos consume a lot of data. The good news is that, you can turn this auto-play function off. Just find “Settings” in the app and change ‘Videos Auto-play’ to ‘Off’ or just set it to ‘Wi-Fi Only’, so they’ll only play when you’re connected to Wi-Fi.

3. Streaming music is costly, it is better to download once and for all or wait for Wi-Fi
Streaming music is a great way to listen to your favorite tunes on the go, but even free music-streaming applications deplete data pretty quickly. Apps like Spotify and Spinlet can burn through nearly 1MB per minute. If you have a 2GB data plan, that gives you little more than just an hour per day listening time a month—and that’s only if you don’t consume data using anything else.

The best solution is to listen to music when you’re connected to Wi-Fi, whether it be at work or home, or store it in the built-in memory in the phone. Some streaming apps will offer an offline listening option, sometimes at a nominal fee, where it will download some of your upcoming playlist into the phone’s memory while you are on Wi-Fi.

4. If you can’t stream music, you cant streaming video too. Use Wi-Fi

If you like to catch up on your favorite television show during lunch, you may be exceeding your plan’s data limit in no time, especially with fast LTE data connections and HD video. If you absolutely must stream video, check to see if there are any bandwidth options. Youtube, for example, allows users to customize the quality of streaming. The lowest setting may use up 300MB per hour, just a tenth of what it would at the highest setting.

5.Turn off auto-update

You may be using a lot of data if you have apps and services continually running and updating in the background. Just one app or service probably won’t use that much—but more than one can quickly add up to a data burn. Some apps and services, such as email, Twitter and Facebook, are constantly checking for updates. Just turn off background app refresh for just some or all your apps and services.

Advertisement
Comments



Trending