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Cape Town – Mobile data is critical to having a smartphone experience, yet it remains a grudge purchase for South Africans.
Data revenue has emerged as a strong component of mobile operator revenue in SA.
Vodacom reported in 2015 that data made up 26.7% of its R62.1bn service revenue while MTN reported data at 31.7% of revenue.
But many consumers find that spending on data makes up a larger slice of their budget.
According to Cell C Chief Information Officer Maria Pienaar, careful management will see your data bundle delivering better value.
Here are six tips to manage your mobile data:
PC data
“Mobile services are designed to use as little data as possible, but a PC or laptop rarely has that in mind. So avoid treating them as the same,” said Pienaar.
Browsers like Opera can be set to compresses web pages and are able to save up to 85% of data cost. You can also set you PC to download after 00:00 when most operators slash the cost of data.
WATCH: How to keep your data costs down
Deleting apps
Applications that you no longer use could be stealthily downloading data in the background, causing you to blow through those bundles.
“You often hear about app fatigue, resulting from someone trying out too many apps. But how often do we delete the apps we don’t use? Those will continue to be updated and connect online. Deleting will save both data and battery life,” said Pienaar.
Also ensure that you close apps correctly. Apps will often continue to run in the background after you hit the Home key. Close them by checking for running or recent apps and close them.
Network Connections also does real-time monitoring of apps consuming mobile network data.
Updates
Most applications require updates but you can set whether they update over 3G or Wi-Fi networks. On Android phones, go to Google Settings -> Data Management and set your apps to update over Wi-Fi only.
“App updates are very important, because they may contain security patches. But not every update is so important that it has to happen right away,” said Pienaar.
Consumption
READ: Data costs must fall, Fin24 users demand
Even when you have set apps to update over Wi-Fi, some sneaky programs still manage to use large amounts of data.
Go to Settings -> Data Usage on an Android smartphone and tap the Restrict Background Data button from the menu. Here you can also set the total amount of data your phone will use per month and which apps are allowed to access mobile data.
On an iPhone, go to Settings -> Cellular to set which apps are allowed to access data.
“There are several good third-party apps that can show in great detail where data is going,” said Pienaar.
Apps like All-In-One Toolbox are able to help manage misbehaving applications, while Watchdog Lite can check which apps are gobbling system resources.
Multimedia
“More South Africans are streaming videos these days. But it is very data intensive, so make sure video files on a page or feed aren’t chewing up data. They can take a lot in a very short time,” said Pienaar.
Social media apps where you upload video also consume large amounts of data.
In Twitter and Facebook, go to your settings and disable the autoplay feature for videos. WhatsApp allows to limit automatic image and video downloads.
Bundles
“Going out of bundle is a very expensive choice. Any good operator will inform their customer if a bundle is about to be depleted. If you keep running out of bundles, consider buying larger ones. It will work out cheaper than buying smaller quantities of data all the time,” said Pienaar.
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