Data usage for all communications
Interesting snippet in this article/survey of Whatsapp and interest in using it for voice calls.
Calling via the messaging app costs no voice minutes, but does use data if there is no Wi-Fi. Consumption amounts to around 500 kB per minute.
Working out about 8kB per second.
Also means:
- a 30 minute call would be around 15MB
- a 60 minute call would be 30MB
If a current Irish user is about 8.7 hours per month, that's 261MB per month - a drop in the ocean when compared to average data usage (4.4GB last quarter - 6% increase).
I mentioned recently about Netflix reporting they've set usage to around 1GB for 3 hours of video. Say you watch 3 hours while on cellular per month, so 1GB here.
- and we know from Comreg's quarterly reports that average usage per caller is around 210 minutes per month: around 105MB total.
- and if users are now sending multiple hundreds of messages monthly on modern messaging services (known as OTT in the current media) probably measuring another 1GB or so.
- and say, another 1GB of usage for general browsing, doodling on whatever the latest social network is.
What if the final outcome of this data explosion is monthly average usage per user settles around 3-8GB*? And why bother building billing systems to measure per minute and per message for the people providing the services instead of just building a system to only measure bytes?
* I put an asterisk here as my own personal usage is already 6-7GB per month but I'm unsure at present if I'm just an outlier or if my level of usage will become the norm....