Running 5G speed tests may deplete your data plan

With 5G now rolling out to metro cities across India, users are slowly discovering that high-speed internet comes with some grave consequences.

As reported by The Economic Times, social media platforms like Twitter are full of posts with Indian users claiming that they ran out of data after running a few routine speed tests.

In some cases, the high-data consumption can total up to 700 - 800MB per test run, which is usually half of the allotted data limit on most mobile plans.

This is the case during normal operations, too, for example - 10 minutes of browsing Instagram using 5G consumes about 207MB of data, whereas with 4G, it consumes 120MB of data.

The reason for this is that apps usually switch to high-quality content in areas with good 5G coverage, making file sizes larger, which eats into your allocated daily limits faster.

An anonymous industry executive told The Economic Times that once metaverse apps, cloud gaming, 4K streaming and 8K streaming start to become commonplace, we will only see the data consumption go up.

A typical speed test for 5G networks in Delhi reveals download speeds of up to 800Mbps depending on coverage. Unfortunately, this also means you will be consuming around 1GB of data in less than a minute.

Jio is offering unlimited data with a minimum recharge of Rs 230 under its beta trials but there is no word yet on what the final data plans will be like. Airtel users on the other hand are stuck with daily data limits for usage.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a telecoms industry executive told The Economic Times: "Carriers expect data usage to rise at least 2.5 times, if not more, to roughly 40-50GB once they start becoming a 5G consumer".

According to a 2021 report by OpenSignal, data consumption in areas where 5G networks operate at a larger scale (US, South Korea) have already seen a rise in data consumed of 2.7 times compared to 4G. In Taiwan, subscribers use up as much as 47.3GB of data per month.

(Disclaimer: Moneycontrol is a part of the Network18 group. Network18 is controlled by Independent Media Trust, of which Reliance Industries is the sole beneficiary.)