Is Your Network Provider Really Gulping Your Data? 3 Reasons to Suggest Not

There’s been some chatter lately about data customers porting due to ‘fast data exhaustion’ by

certain network service providers. A recent presentation made by Prof. Umar Danbatta, the

Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has come

up to confute the assertions made by many who say that their service providers make illegal

deductions on their data, causing customers to experience early depletion of their data bundles.

According to the EVC’s statement, in a recent presentation to the Federal Ministry of

Communications, “the reasons include the advancement of technology, which has led to the rise

in applications, updates, and services that leverage on this technology and advancement of

supportive data infrastructure.” [I know too many technical jargons, right?] But what exactly does

this mean?

Well, that’s why I am here, I’ll try to explain this to you in the simplest ways I can while

highlighting three major points.

1. Your Device Matters.

When it comes to data, hate it or love it, the device you use matters. Certain phone features and

specs would require more use of data than others, features like GPS and specs like the screen

and video resolution of the device make data consumption deplete faster, if in constant use. You

know how when you go somewhere new and Google asks you to review, and you see “How

was this place?” well, that’s your GPS at work, constantly tracking the device’s location using

your DATA.

2. Internet Quality and Speed.

You’re probably thinking how this should not be a reason, but hear me out. The speed and

quality of your internet could be another reason your data finishes early, if not controlled

properly. Most sites and apps are created to provide you with the best quality content possible,

so say you’re streaming a movie from Netflix for instance with high quality internet and a 4K

display device, once you hit the ‘Play’ button, it provides you with the best quality of video

available that would not interrupt your viewing, this results in a higher use of data. The same

applies when you use a network with tacky internet quality, these sites and apps automatically

recommend or play lower quality videos, images and text that suit the internet quality and

speed.

Even for emails, we’ve all had those days where our service providers have crappy networks

and we can’t even open emails, then we see a suggestion to ‘open page using HTML’, that’s it

suggesting a lower quality page for less data to suit that immediate need based on our internet

quality.

3. The rise and rise of display and video advertising.

We all see those adverts hanging somewhere around the webpage we are on, luring us to click

to buy or engage with certain other websites for products or services we’ve been searching for

[Display Ads] and also those sites and apps that make us watch a video for about 5 -30

seconds, until we are able to skip before proceeding to what we actually want to do [Video Ads].

Well, the contribute a lot tour data usage and again, and with the continuous use of these types

of ads, together with the improved features of smartphones, it’s undeniable that the use of data

would be the price that customers would pay.

That said, there are a few hacks customers can subscribe to in order to improve their data

consumption; setting data capacity limits, tweaking device settings and features, tweaking app

features and settings, enabling ad blockers on websites, and paying for apps to remove video

ads.