Data usage seems higher than my old provider

[christophersilv]

So I just switched to the 4.5gb/45$mo plan today from an older Speakout Mobile 711 plan. I set everything up fine and started to use my data but noticed that it seems to be going at a much higher rate than with Speakout.

I loaded the front page of reddit (reddit.com/r/all) and it used 10mb of data just to do the one page! With speakout I could load a page for 0.5-1mb, so it seems to be using 10x as much data. Checking between both the usage history on my phone (iPhone 6s) and the usage history on my account profile, they match up and my phone says chrome has used 34 of the 37 mb of data, where all I did was load reddit 3 times. (have since tested a few more times, its using 10-15mb per webpage load)

Can anyone explain this to me? If I'm going to burn through data at 10x the rate of my old plan, the switch isnt going to be worth it. Happy to provide more details if needed. I am NOT using LTE either.

Thanks!

[srlawren]

@christophersilv I wonder if maybe you had data compression/data saver turned on with Freedom but somehow it got turned off by an app update around the time of your moving to PM?  Or something?

You can control the feature here if you're curious:

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2392284?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid

[will13am]

This is not the first query about the data meter's accuracy and it definitely will not be the last.  For most of who have been with this service for a while and track our data using multiple means (Public Mobile usage meter, android data meter, data witness app), we generally find pretty good agreement.  Definitely, the delta is not 10x. 

[christophersilv]

thanks, ill give it a shot!

[Korade]

Hi christopher,

For Reddit specifically (and most social media apps that involve videos/photos), try to download an actual app with settings, and disable "autoplay videos", and "autoload photo previews", or even a data saver mode. 

I'm not sure this directly answers your question, but it's one I've used to help with data management. Good luck.

[matbasm]

@christophersilv, Not sure if you have done this, but if you wiped out/cleared your browsers' cache, that would cause all pages/images/etc. to get downloaded again from scratch.  If you revist the same page, it is likely that the data used will be far less (of course, this depends on how much of the page content has changed since the last access).