Do you know why daily Mobile data of 2GB is consumed so fast?

I saw a great article (you can see the source at the end), and i would like to ask you Experts what is your opinion?

This is insightful, but is it worth the operators make some kind of adjustment - or at least inform users that they have this option (to spend less with lower resolution)?

Or… the more they spend, the better for them (operators)?

Do you know why daily Mobile data of 2GB is consumed so fast when we watch few You-tube videos and attend some meetings on Zoom?? I too wonder why certain videos take a lot of bandwidth.

As a Wireless QA Engineer and being curious to find out the pattern of data consumption, we tried first by running a YT video at different resolutions and at different playback speeds on my Wi-Fi Test Network and here is the data and findings!
I observed the max speed requirement to play the video with resolutions 144p,480p,1080p,2160p are 1.3,5,10,30 Mbps respectively. No wonder why my data quickly got over when I try to play video on high resolution.
Also, note the variation of download trend when we increase the play back speed for each resolution. At normal speed we see more gaps in between the download but when we increase the speed, application downloads in a more consistent rate. This I think is to keep the buffer filled for uninterrupted play back.

Next, while attending one of the zoom meeting, We have tried to verify the data consumption at different kinds of traffic in real time. We can clearly observe that,
With only Audio, i.e. only voice traffic, we can see a max consumption rate of 0.2-0.3Mbps.
While enabling video (upload)along with voice Traffic, we can notice around 2Mbps of data transfer.

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I think this might be an insight, new idea, for mobile operators.

Operators do not focus on providing this type of QoS to the customer.

It would be interesting, for example, if the user could “reduce the quality of some types of applications”… more or less like we do when our cell phone’s battery is running low and we don’t have a charger nearby.

As far as I know, Instagram app spends too much data. Onetime I was comparing data consumption between my wife and me, and she spent 4x more than me. Instagram default settings were “data saving” and "high quality video"set as ON.

I see you used Scrcpy to mirror a realme device on computer screen. Could you please share the name of other applications you used to do these comparisons? Tks

I think there’s a trade-off here…

  • There are users who want to have very high quality videos - and they will always pay more for it.

  • And there are users who just want to have the service - even if it’s minimal, within their financial capacity.

In this way, I believe that an application of this type would be good for all users, as they would have transparency in their contract with the Operator.

It would be some kind of “QoS App”, where the user himself would enable his settings and desires.