Use Instagram for an hour or so (which you’d do if you’re an online marketer) and you can easily use a whole gig! To keep you up-to-date on everything going on in your crazy life, phones download a sometimes crazy amount of data. However, it’s not easy to cap data use! Phones and computers are incredibly complicated these days. So it makes sense to monitor and cap your data use. In developed countries like Australia, your data speeds will be throttled once you reach a certain amount, unless you’re paying a LOT for your connection. The signal/speed means we have to throttle data usage, so our apps can breathe, and browsing websites is tolerable.Įven apart from the challenges of less-developed countries, in most parts of the world (everywhere?) data is capped. Secondly, signal strength and data speeds aren’t great. In some parts of the world you can recharge online, but it’s not reliable or necessarily safe to use your credit card with an untrusted website. We usually need to get cash out first (and ATMs aren’t that abundant in rural areas). It’s easy to use several gigs a day even if you’re not downloading movies and TV shows - a luxury we have to mostly forego (or do just occasionally, and in low quality).įirstly, apart from the embarrassment of needing to swim in data like Scrooge McDuck swam through his gold coins, it’s slightly annoying going and buying credits. Why throttle your data (both consumption and speed)Įven with this extravagant data purchasing, we have to be conservative in what we use. Step 4: Throttle data use on your laptop (when tethering).Step 3: Configure the apps correctly to use less data. ![]() Step 2: Get low-data apps for your phone.Step 1: Configure your phone to use less data. ![]() Set-up: Start counting the data you use (so you can know where to cut back).Why throttle your data (both consumption and speed).Naturally, all of this is good impetus for us to try to restrict our data usage to the minimum. Think of us as the less-developed-country equivalent of that venture capitalist you know whose assistant nonchalantly pays their $250 phone bills. This is implicit in that half the time we buy credits, we buy all the credits available in the rural store! For most others, it’s definitely luxury levels. We’re pretty aware that there are people for whom this is their entire salary. ![]() So much so that to buy credits, we go to different stores each time. We manage to get by on that (each!), tethering to our laptops, if we cut back on data, for the entirety of our digital professional lives.īut it’s still kind of embarrassing dropping $10 every week. In Tanzania it costs us about $5 for 10GB, using a weekly bundle. This is a guide to cutting down all those sneaky services that eat up your bandwidth without you knowing it, unnecessarily curtailing your fun.įor people on Western tourist budgets, data isn’t too expensive in most parts of the world (that have it). ![]() This isn’t a guide to an ascetic, monk-like lifestyle where you do just the bare minimum, too. Whether you buy a SIM card or roam using Google Fi, T-Mobile or some other provider, or even if you’re using metered hotel data (which I hate! it’s so expensive), it pays to measure how much data you’re using and cut back on everything that’s not essential. In places we travel to in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, we spend more on data than many people spend on food.
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