Data Diet

The good old USA is mostly a land of no limits.  We pretty much have all the electric, gas, water, phone, texting and internet we can use.  Sure, we get a bill at the end of the month for our water, electric and gas but, if you are like me, unless it is drastically different than last month’s bill we don’t really pay attention to how many gallons of water, kilowatt hours of electricity or cubic feet of natural gas we’ve used.  Even if we do, we really have no idea what or who is using it and when.  Can you imagine what would happen if there was an app that alerted you with the dollar amount you just used when you flushed the toilet, took that really long shower, dried that load of wet towels, watered your lawn, stared in the open door of your fridge or adjusted your AC/furnace down/up a couple degrees?  Well, its no app, but living in a self contained rolling house is definitely a step in that direction.  With a limited amount of waste water and garbage holding capacity and finite supply of water, electricity, propane and internet you become keenly aware of your usage.  And, the cool part?  You become keenly aware of how little you actually need to be comfortable!!  It has definitely piqued my interest in off-grid living.  But in this post I will just focus on the data diet we adopted while on the road.

As mentioned before, we decided to try the 20GB per month plan through Verizon which gave us about 650MB per day of data.  Couple that with the occasional campground WiFi and we were able to get along just fine on this plan.

I already mentioned the free software GlassWire that I used on our PCs to monitor data usage real time while still connected to the hard wired, infinite data plan at our sticks and bricks.  With this tool I was able to find some of the big data hitters.  They are pretty obvious but I found some sneakier phantom data users and also began to get a feel for what sort of data images and video used.  I could watch a YouTube video using different quality levels (adjust this by clicking the little gear in the lower right of the video window) to learn how that used data.  I found that at a video quality of 240 (pretty bad but still viewable for many things) I used about 3.6MB of data every minute.  With our 20GB/month plan that meant we could potentially watch 185 minutes of poor quality video a day (as long as we did nothing else that used data).  For us it made the most sense to remove video from our data diet unless we had free WiFi.  This worked out just fine….while it was a bit hard to kick the habit it has been a healthy move.

One of my clients uses Google Hangouts for meetings.  Even when not on a data diet I usually disabled the video part as did many other participants.  I don’t think it adds that much value and I also don’t have to worry if I accidentally pick my nose on camera.  But even the audio used some data.  It turns out that you can join a google hangout by phone number thereby using your, most likely, unlimited talk minutes for those meetings.  I have another client that uses Zoom  and UberConference and the same applies there.  Using GlassWire during video conferencing I noticed that Zoom definitely used more data than Hangouts with the former having almost no control over video quality compared to the latter.

Windows 8 and higher allows you to set a WiFi connection as “metered“.  This is genius.  Just like you can set the computer’s behavior based on if you are getting power from the wall or you are running on battery, this lets you adjust data usage behavior based on whether the internet connection is metered (you are paying per GB) or not.  This prevents those big automatic updates and such from using up all my allotted data for the day before I’ve even gotten out of my snug bed.

For general internet browsing there are lots of fancy plugins and extensions for browsers.  I use Chrome and installed the DataSaver extension.  According to the extension, it has saved me 12GB of data over the course of the last 60 days.  That’s pretty good!  I also made it so plugins had to ask my permission to run.  In Chrome this is done by hamburger-> settings->advanced->privacy->content settings->plugins and checking “Let me choose when to run plugin content”.

Images can be a big user of data as well, however I found that unless you are dealing with pretty high quality images you shouldn’t have to worry.  There are some Chrome browser settings that allow you to disable ALL images but I think this is unnecessary.  Most images on web pages are pretty small so that they load quickly.  Now, uploading our pictures to Flickr for safe keeping and use in our blog had the potential to blow through data quickly.  For this I decided to trade off some image quality for data savings.  I used an online tool to resize my photos in bulk.  While the tool is accessed online, all of the image resizing occurs client side (that is, on my computer) and does not use any data.  I would drag and drop a bunch of images in there, set my resize strategy (I always chose to make the longest side of a picture 2000 pixels) and out would pop a zip file of images.  This typically gave me a 10X reduction of the image size on disk and therefore very manageable on my allotted 650MB per day when uploading them to Flickr.  I then used the Slickr Flickr plugin for WordPress which allowed me to easily share my Flickr images on this blog.

We disabled all app updates on our mobile devices to prevent these from using up data when we weren’t looking and I also always put the hotspot in airplane mode when I went to bed to make sure no device could try to update in the middle of the night and use loads of data.

We ALWAYS had unused data at the end of the billing cycle.  For one, I always tried to stay behind our daily allotment of data so that we had margin to cover an unexpected big download or video conference for work.  Also, the next higher data plan Verizon offered was 30GB which would have been too much and those extra 10GB cost more per GB than the first 20 I already purchased.  I’m not sure how much “overage” charges are but I wanted to avoid them.  Finally, I felt that the data usage shown on the hotspot was always about a day behind.  I really wanted something more real time.  So, I felt I had to actually pay for more data than I got to use.  If I could design my own 4g service it would have the following:

1. Rollover data or a reasonable rate for going over my data limit.
2. Real time data usage shown on the device
3. Tools to allow me to set real time data usage alerts and/or limits.  This would be similar to a fuse or breaker in your electrical system.  For example I could set it so I was alerted if I was using more than 1MB per minute over a 5min period.  Or I can have it completely shut down if more than 5MB per minute is being consumed.  Of course, I can always override these.  Verizon has some alerts, but they are comical in their usefulness.

Well, I hope I was able to provide some useful information to you about how you can reduce your data usage while on the road.  If you have any questions or anything feel free to leave a comment or use our contact page to send us a note.