Secretly using traffic on your phone. What is mobile traffic on a phone? How to save mobile traffic on Android

. Despite the fact that cellular networks provide us with increasingly high-speed access to the World Wide Web, mobile Internet still remains a rather expensive pleasure. Especially if you carelessly exceed the amount of traffic provided for in your contract, or, moreover, connect to the network while roaming. In this case, the extra megabytes (and at high speeds, perhaps even gigabytes) could result in a hefty bill from your carrier. In the following guide for beginners, you will learn about measures that will help you significantly reduce your mobile traffic consumption. But first of all, you need to determine which applications are the biggest consumers of traffic. For this purpose, the Android OS has a built-in tool, which in different versions and firmware may be called “Traffic Control”, “Data Usage” or “Data Transfer”.

Here you can not only find out the most “gluttonous” programs, but also set a monthly traffic limit, upon reaching which data transfer over the mobile network will be disabled. Tapping the name of any of the programs listed on this screen will take you to more detailed information about mobile data usage. You can also limit background transmission for this application by checking the corresponding box at the bottom of the window. However, it is also possible to do this not for each program separately, but for all at once. To do this, open the additional settings menu in the “Data Transfer” window and check the “Limit background traffic” option. Don’t forget also about the option to completely block data transfer while roaming, which is located in the SIM card settings section.

Having carefully studied the list of the main consumers of mobile traffic, you will see that there are not so many of them. This is mainly web surfing, listening to streaming audio, navigation, and watching videos. Below you will find some tips on how to save mobile megabytes for the listed uses.

Browser

To save mobile traffic when viewing websites, we recommend that you use a special browser that has a data compression function. This possibility exists, for example, in the Chrome and Opera browsers. At the same time, all data on the way to you is pre-compressed on a special intermediate server, which allows you to significantly reduce its volume.

Video

Watching videos is the most dangerous activity for your data megabytes. Just one small video in good quality can exhaust the entire monthly limit, so it’s better to take care of saving in advance. Since the YouTube service is mainly used to watch streaming videos, this application usually appears on the list of main traffic consumers. Open the settings of this application and enable the “Limit mobile traffic” option.

Music

If your music collection is located in the clouds and you do not want to lose access to it even in the absence of a high-speed connection, then you will have to make several manipulations to save traffic. In almost all music applications that download data from the network, you can select the broadcast quality. For example, in Google Play Music you need to go to the settings and check the “Upload over Wi-Fi only” option, which will prevent the use of a mobile connection to cache music. In addition, here you can select the sound quality over the mobile network or even prohibit data transfer through this connection.

Cards

Loading data with mapping programs is another problem, which, moreover, often arises precisely at the moment when you are somewhere abroad, that is, in roaming. It is very easy to solve this problem if you take care of caching the desired section of the map in advance. This option is available in the most popular programs in this category, Google Maps and Yandex.Maps.

In addition, there is always the opportunity to use one of the programs that were specially created to work without an Internet connection, for example OsmAnd or.

Use Opera Max

While the methods listed above allow you to minimize only individual consumption items, Opera Max approaches the issue more globally. This program lets you know which apps are consuming the most data and can compress videos, photos, and other images in almost every app on your phone. With Opera Max, traffic savings can reach up to 50%, which means that instead of the 1 GB provided by your tariff plan, you can get 1.5 GB.

Now mobile Internet is relatively inexpensive, but this is not a reason to throw it away left and right. Full unlimited service still costs a pretty penny, and many operators, by the way, are already giving up such luxury.

Most of the available tariffs are conditionally unlimited, that is, they provide a certain and rather limited amount of traffic per day or month. If you exceed the limit, the speed will drop to the level of a dial-up modem and it will become impossible to use the Internet.

Perhaps you do not fit into the volume provided under the tariff or are dangerously close to the limit. Perhaps you want to save some traffic reserve so that you can use it when urgently needed. In any case, it is useful to be able to save megabytes, and now we will tell you how to do this.

Get rid of pest apps

Increased traffic consumption is not always related to your appetite. Often the unjustified gluttony of individual applications is to blame. Such scoundrels sit in the background and constantly transmit and send something. You can find them using a standard tool that is built into any current version of Android.

1. Go to Android settings.
2. Select Data Transfer.
3. Select Mobile Data Transfer.

Here you will see a general graph of mobile traffic consumption, and below it - a rating of the most voracious residents of the system.

To curb the ardor of an individual application, tap on it and turn off the background mode. After this, the sly one will not be able to receive and send data in the background.

The problem is that in order to identify scoundrels, you need to understand what the normal Internet consumption is for a particular application. Obviously, the browser, music and video streaming services, as well as maps are capable of eating hundreds of megabytes, but offline-oriented and working with a small amount of data have nothing on this list.

Set up a warning and traffic limit

1. Go to Android settings.
2. Select Data Transfer.
3. Select "Payment Cycle".

The billing cycle is the date when the subscription fee is charged. Usually a new Internet package is given on the same day. Specify it so that the system knows the date the traffic counter was reset.

1. Enable "Alert Settings".
2. Select Alerts.
3. Specify the amount of traffic upon reaching which the system will notify you about it.

If you want to strictly limit traffic consumption, enable “Set traffic limit” and specify the value, upon reaching which the system will turn off the mobile Internet.

Disable app updates via mobile network

1. Go to the Google Play app store settings.
2. Select Auto-update apps.
3. Select the "Wi-Fi Only" option.

Enable data saving in Android

1. Go to Android settings.
2. Select Data Transfer.
3. Select Data Saver.

After enabling traffic saving mode, the system will prohibit background data traffic for most applications, which will significantly reduce overall traffic consumption. To allow data sharing in the background for individual applications in economy mode, tap on the appropriate item.

Save data with Opera Max

In fact, the Opera Max application does the same thing as the data saving mode built into Android, that is, it blocks background data, but it looks a little nicer and more visual.

Enable data saving in individual applications

Any normal developer, if his application works with potentially large amounts of data, can optimize traffic consumption using settings. For example, almost all Google tools can save precious megabytes of mobile Internet.

Google Chrome

1. Go to Google Chrome settings.
2. Select Data Saver.

In addition to Google Chrome, a traffic saving mode is provided in the Opera browser.

YouTube

1. Go to YouTube settings.
2. Select General.
3. Turn on the “Traffic Saving” mode.

Google Maps

1. Go to Google Maps settings.
2. Turn on “Wi-Fi only” and follow the “Your offline maps” link.

Offline maps allow you to save hundreds of megabytes of traffic. Be sure to download the area where you live and don’t forget to add areas you plan to visit in the near future.

1. Click Other Area.
2. Use pan and zoom gestures to select the area to download and click "Download".
3. Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Downloaded Areas menu.
4. Select "Download Settings" and select "Wi-Fi Only".

Google Press

1. Go to Google Press settings.
2. Select Data Saver Mode and select On.
3. In the "Download" section, turn on the "Wi-Fi only" mode.

Google Photos

1. Go to Google Photos settings.
2. Find the “Use mobile internet” section and disable the option for photos and videos.

Google Music

1. Go to your Google Music settings.
2. In the Playback section, lower the quality when streaming over a mobile network.
3. In the “Downloading” section, allow downloading music only over Wi-Fi.

If necessary, allow music playback only over Wi-Fi.

Google Music can save albums for offline listening. You can download music to your device if you have Wi-Fi and play it without an Internet connection.

1. Go to the artist's album list.
2. Click on the vertical ellipsis icon in the lower right corner of the album and select “Download” from the menu that appears.

Google Movies

1. Go to Google Movies settings.
2. Under Mobile Network Streaming, turn on Show Warning and Limit Quality.
3. In the Downloads section, select Network and select Wi-Fi only.

Monitor your carrier's rates and options

Often a person overpays for communications simply because he is on an outdated tariff. Find out what's new with your operator. It's possible that you can get more internet for less money.

Hello friends. It's summer, many people go on vacation, or somewhere far from the city, and of course a problem arises, but what about the Internet? After all, somewhere outside the city most likely he won’t be there, so what then? Panic begins, tears and all that :).

Well, of course there is a way out, you just need to get mobile Internet. Can buy GPRS or 3G modem. In the first case, the speed will be lower, but most likely it will reliably receive the signal almost everywhere. In turn, 3G technology will provide greater speed, but the signal will not be as stable and you may need to buy an antenna. I wrote about setting up 3G Internet in an article.

I switched to modems, but I wanted to write about how to save internet traffic. Well, of course, GPRS and 3G Internet are not very cheap now; compared to the city network, they are even expensive. That is why I decided to write today's article. So, with the right approach, you can save a lot of Internet traffic, and traffic means money.

All tariffs of mobile Internet operators have package restrictions or fees for spent Internet traffic, and in the first and second cases, tips on saving traffic will be useful.

First of all, I advise you to install a program on your computer that will measure the Internet traffic you spend.

I recommend the program to you NetWorx. This program has a clear Russian interface and can do a lot. You can measure traffic by hours, days, or whatever is convenient for you; you can set restrictions for a day or a month, and the program will warn you when your tariff plan ends, which will save you from unnecessary expenses, because traffic in excess of the package is not very cheap.

Turn off the image

I remember when I still used GPRS Internet via my phone, I always turned off image display in the browser. Graphics on web pages take up a lot of traffic and this is very bad. It seems to me that surfing the Internet can be convenient without pictures, but it’s a little unoriginal.

You can disable the image in the settings of any browser. For example, in Opera we go to “Tools”, “General settings” tab “Web pages” and where the image is selected “No images” and click “OK”.

Now you can try to use the Internet without images; by the way, this method also very effectively increases the speed of loading pages.

Cache is a great traffic saver

Cache is elements of a web page that the browser saves on the computer and the next time these elements are accessed, it does not download them again from the Internet. Cache is really good at saving traffic when you visit the same site many times. For example, you logged into VKontakte once, the browser downloaded an image of your friends and saved them to your hard drive.

When you visit this site again, the browser will not re-download these images and thereby save Internet traffic.

Service for saving Internet traffic

Although I am a supporter of all sorts of services and add-ons, I can recommend Toonel.net to save traffic. This service compresses Internet traffic well and allows you to save money. By the way, the service is completely free.

Advertising is the main traffic eater

There’s a lot of advertising on websites now, even I have a little, but of course, I want to eat it :). But advertising takes away almost half of your traffic. Flash advertising does this especially well. To disable advertising, you need to use add-ons for different browsers. Just type in any search engine “ how to disable advertising in Opera(or another browser)".

Separately, I would like to note the excellent function in the Opera browser. Turbo mode helps save traffic and increase the loading speed of Internet pages on a not very fast connection. All traffic that you request will be passed and processed through Opera's servers, and will arrive on your computer in compressed form.

Activating Turbo mode is very simple. Go to the browser and find a button in the form of a speedometer at the bottom left (above the start button).

Click on it and Select “Enable Turbo Mode”, the button will light up blue and the turbo mode will start working.

Offtopic: In just a couple of days I’ll take my last exam and go home for the summer. Of course, I’m taking the computer, but the Internet... I decided to get the Internet from Intertelecom, buy a modem and most likely have to buy an antenna.

So these tips will also be useful to me, although 1000 MB for 5 UAH. per day doesn’t seem very bad to me, we’ll see what the speed will be. Good luck!

Also on the site:

Updated: January 11, 2015 by: admin

As users move more and more to cloud services, saving traffic becomes an important element for increasing Internet bandwidth. In addition, some tariff plans today require payment for the amount of downloaded data. This is especially true for mobile providers.

What kind of traffic saving program can actually be implemented? Below are some effective ways.

Blocking websites with streaming content

The first thing you should do is block access to streaming media sites (such as Netflix, YouTube and MetaCafe). Of course, watching a small video on YouTube will not make a significant difference and will not make your Internet connection slow, but large volumes of such content require a lot of bandwidth. By disabling access to all resources of this kind, you will notice that saving traffic is very possible.

Stop a cloud backup application

If you're always running in the cloud, check to see if your application has a throttling mechanism. Such a service will require a lot of traffic and take up most of the bandwidth. This won't be noticeable if you make small files (such as Microsoft Office documents) throughout the day. But when you start uploading bulk data to the cloud, the initial backup should be created only on your computer. If constant throttling is left unchecked, it can have a significant impact on your data usage.

Limiting VoIP Use

VoIP is another traffic intensive one. If you plan to use this technology, you should limit the duration of calls as much as possible. If you talk for a long time and use any of its extensions when working with the service, saving traffic will not be effective.

Using a cache proxy

A cache proxy can help limit the amount of traffic generated by your web browser. The basic idea is that when a user visits a website, the content of the page is cached on the proxy server. The next time the user visits the same page, its content should not be loaded again (since it already exists in the cache). Using a cache proxy not only saves bandwidth, but can also give users the illusion that the Internet connection is much faster than it actually is. This is a useful feature no matter what plan you use.

Centralization of application updates

Today, almost every application is configured to download periodic updates over the Internet. You can save a lot of bandwidth by centralizing the update process. For example, instead of allowing every device in your home to connect to Microsoft Update, you need to download all the updates and then make them available to individual gadgets. This way, the same updates won't be downloaded over and over again.

Using Hosted Filtering

If you manage your own mail server, then excellent traffic savings will be provided by using Hosted Filtering. Thanks to this service, the data will be downloaded on the cloud server, and not on your email server. This server receives all mail that is intended for you and filters out spam or messages containing malicious software. The remaining messages are sent to their destination. You can save a lot of traffic (and mail server resources) by not receiving a lot of spam messages.

Active scanning for malware

Malware can use up a lot of traffic without your knowledge by using your computer as a bot. Be diligent in your efforts to keep all your online devices free of infection.

Using QoS to Reserve Traffic

QoS stands for quality of service. This mechanism (bandwidth reservation), which was first introduced in Windows 2000, continues to be relevant today. If you have applications that require a certain amount of bandwidth (for example, video conferencing applications), you can configure QoS to reserve the required amount of data bandwidth for that application. This traffic saving only applies when the application is actively used. In other cases, the amount of data reserved for the application becomes available for use for other purposes.

Make sure you're not overpaying for traffic

As noted above, many factors affect the Internet, so you cannot expect to be able to connect to every website at the maximum speed of your connection. However, your Internet connection should provide performance that is fairly close to what you pay for.

It is very unlikely that a provider will intentionally provide someone with a slower connection than what is provided for in the contract and payment, but there are often cases in which the connection ends up being split across multiple devices. In the case of such a shared connection, the user activity of one of the devices can directly affect the download speed of data. If your internet connection isn't as fast as it should be, try to sort out all the connections on your network.

In addition, it is necessary to regularly monitor the traffic that you spend while working on the Internet. If you notice significant overspending, you should think about which services you are using too much. If the traffic savings are quite noticeable and you do not consume most of the data provided by the provider, you can think about switching to a lighter tariff plan.

Opera browser and Turbo mode

The well-known “Turbo” mode, which is available in any version of the Opera browser, as well as in Yandex.Browser, can be used not only to speed up downloaded data, but also to reduce traffic volumes. The essence of its work is that when loading pages, the servers of the browser itself are used, and due to this, the amount of data downloaded when connecting is reduced. Therefore, if it is important for you to save data transfer volume, work only in Turbo mode.

In this case, there will be no problems with how to disable traffic saving. Just go to the appropriate settings and disable the above option.

Savings on mobile devices

An unlimited tariff from a mobile operator is much less common, and many people use the 3G function. How can traffic savings be achieved on a smartphone?

If you have an Android device, you can set a traffic limit that can be consumed in a certain period of time. There's even an alert setting available that can be placed on your desktop as a widget. You don't even need a special application to save traffic for this.

To make such settings, you need to go to the “Settings” menu, select “Wireless Networks” and in further paragraphs find the “Traffic Control” tab. Depending on the Android OS version, the names of menu items may differ. Once in the specified setting, you need to set a limit on the amount of data that you allow for use. If you exceed the limit you specify, the Internet will simply turn off.

Traffic savings: beta versions of special mobile applications

Currently, there are also more and more special programs and browser extensions designed to save traffic. One of the most famous is Opera Max beta, which is specialized software that compresses any transmitted data. Thus, the beta program saves traffic not only through the browser, but also through information from instant messengers and other applications running on the Internet.

Cellular networks provide faster and faster access to the World Wide Web, and traffic consumption by mobile devices is only growing. However, mobile Internet is still not a cheap pleasure: many people still use tariffs with a traffic volume of 4 GB, and many people travel, and the Internet while traveling is much more expensive.
In this article, we will look at seven ways to save mobile traffic, from the simplest ones available in the Android settings, to means of compressing transmitted data, a complete ban on data transfer, and completely unobvious approaches, such as installing an ad blocker.

1. Standard Android tools

A few simple steps can help reduce the amount of data transferred.

1. Go to the Play Store settings and in the “Auto-update applications” option, select “Never”. Uncheck the box next to “Availability of updates”.
2. Go to Settings → Location and turn off Location History.
3. “Settings → Accounts”, “Menu” button, uncheck “Auto-sync data”. Internet usage will decrease noticeably, but mail and application notifications will stop coming.
4. Now go back to settings and go to “Data Transfer”. Click "Menu" and select "Limit background activity." As a result, the battery life of the smartphone will increase and Internet consumption will decrease, but notifications from instant messengers will no longer be received. Therefore, a better solution would be to go through the list, find not very important applications and limit their access to background data and/or data on cellular networks.
5. Open Google Settings and go to Security. I don’t recommend disabling “Check for security problems,” but unchecking the “Anti-malware” checkbox would be the right decision. At your own peril and risk, you can disable “Remote device search” and “Remote blocking”.
6. In the same “Google Settings”, go to “Data Management” (at the bottom of the list) and set “Application Data Update” to “Wi-Fi Only”.
7. Go back and open Search & Google Now. Go to the “Personal Data” section and turn off “Send statistics”. In the menu “Voice search → Offline speech recognition”, download the package for offline recognition and disable its auto-update or select “Only via Wi-Fi”. You can also go to the “Feed” section and turn it off. The Ribbon is the left screen of the Google Start or home screen of the Google app. Here you can disable “Screen Search” (Google Now on tap). Well, at the very bottom, turn off the “Recommended applications” item.
8. Don’t forget to turn off auto-checking and auto-downloading updates in “Settings → About phone.”

2. Get rid of advertising

Oddly enough, one way to reduce traffic consumption is to block ads. The indispensable AdAway program will help with this. It completely denies access to ad servers, blocking it at the system level. In other words, when an application accesses an address that is in its database, the request goes nowhere. By the way, activity tracking services (those that monitor user actions) are also blocked. The application requires root permissions (and S-OFF on HTC) to run.

When the blocking is enabled, problems may arise with the operation of some applications for making money from advertising (for example, NewApp, AdvertApp, CoinsUP - the latter did not show anything at all until recently). Other incompatibilities are also possible: six months ago, the Weather Underground application did not work due to AdAway. In the latest versions, everything has become ok (either Weather Underground changed something, or AdAway corrected the host addresses).

3. Saving using your browser

There are not so many browsers with a built-in data saving mode. I selected five and tested them by opening seven web pages.

Firefox

Used for benchmark testing. There is no saving mode here.

Consumption: 13.33 MB

Opera Mini

The most economical browser. Allows you to save up to 90% of traffic (on average up to 70–80%). The data is compressed so much that you can browse the Internet on Edge or even GPRS networks. It all works by using its own engine, which represents web pages not as text, but as binary code. And Opera servers are responsible for converting pages into this code. Plus a built-in ad blocker, video and image compression.

There is also a super-saving mode, which includes aggressive compression methods, which in some cases break pages. For example, the Eldorado store website did not open at all in this mode, YouTube opened in the WAP version, the map could not be viewed on the OpenStreetMap website, and the article from xakep.ru opened with distortions. With the super economy mode turned off, these problems disappear.

Consumption: 12 MB

Opera

It differs from the Mini version in a different interface and the absence of a super saving mode. But it works faster.

Consumption: 12.15 MB

Chrome

This browser also has a data saver, but no ad blocker. According to the developers, savings average 20–40% depending on the content. But in practice, in almost a month I saved as much as 4%.

To activate, you need to go to settings and enable the “Traffic saving” item. There are no settings, statistics on saved megabytes can only be assessed by traffic, there are no statistics on sites, there is no ad blocker and support for extensions (for installing the blocker).

The saving mode itself works completely unnoticed. The quality of the pictures does not suffer, and the page loading speed remains almost unchanged. That is, Chrome was and remains one of the fastest browsers. And he turned out to be the most gluttonous.

Consumption: 15.5 MB

Puffin

Desktop versions of YouTube and Play Store sites opened instead of mobile ones. But the savings are obvious.

Consumption: 5 MB

4. Lazy reading services

Pocket lets you save articles to read “for later.” And it has an interesting property that will help save traffic. When you add an article (no matter from a PC or mobile device), if there is a Wi-Fi connection, it is immediately downloaded to the device and becomes available for offline reading. Only the text and images from the article are saved, and all other garbage is deleted, and it becomes possible to change the font size and background.

Pocket has a competitor - Instapaper. In terms of functionality and quality of work, it is almost identical.

5. Auto-sync files over Wi-Fi

If you often use Dropbox and other services to access your files from your smartphone, pay attention to
FolderSync. It can synchronize selected folders with a smartphone immediately when files are changed and only when connected to Wi-Fi. So you'll never have to download files to your smartphone over the mobile network if you forgot to do so while at home.

6. Completely disconnect applications from the Internet

AFWall+ allows you to disconnect selected applications from the Internet. You can unlink both installed applications and system services, such as ADB. Unlike the built-in restrictor in Android, AFWall blocks access not only in the background, but also in the active mode. You can also use it to give Internet access to only one application in the system. This feature will certainly appeal to users who pay per megabyte (hello, roaming!).

In CyanogenMod 13, you can restrict network access through “Settings → Privacy → Protected Mode.” This feature has not yet been added to CM 14.1.

7. Data compressors

The market has several very unique applications. They create a VPN tunnel, compressing traffic along the way. Two striking examples: Opera Max and Onavo Extend. Their developers promise up to 50% savings. But we won’t take their word for it and will conduct our own test.

So, the amount of transmitted traffic without savers:

• Websites: 14.62 MB (five pieces)
• YouTube 173 MB (1080p video)

The changes became noticeable immediately: the time it took to open sites increased due to some pause after clicking on a link. And the pages themselves began to load a little longer. The video on YouTube (more precisely, the advertisement before it) took a very long time to load. Moreover, the download speed was almost zero. But what’s most interesting is that Opera Max itself consumed 12.5 MB.

• Websites: 11.59 MB
• YouTube 3 MB (video did not start)

Onavo Extend

The situation here is almost the same. Everything became slower, although not as much as in the case of Opera. And the video started without problems in 1080p. Total:

• Websites: 14.73 MB
• YouTube 171 MB

We track and control internet consumption

The standard traffic manager in Android (Settings → Data transfer) is very convenient and quite functional. For most users who use tariffs with a monthly Internet limit, this will be enough. However, I recommend that others use the analogue from the Play Store. And third-party applications show much more useful information. - Xposed module showing data transfer speed. It can be perfectly customized and consumes virtually no battery power.

Are unlimited tariffs so unlimited?

The line of postpaid tariffs “Everything” from Beeline, “Unlimited Black” from Tele2, “Smart Unlimited” from MTS and some other tariffs, according to the operator, offer full-fledged unlimited Internet on a smartphone. Is it possible to blindly believe these loud promises? Is everything really so rosy and the Internet will soon become completely free?

It's actually not that simple. Everyone knows about restrictions on torrents and using a smartphone as an access point, and in addition, often after reaching a certain amount of data received, the speed is limited.

As a study of many forums has shown, almost all operators with so-called unlimited speeds reduce the speed after reaching 30 GB in 3G networks (up to 512 Kbps), and in 4G it’s different for everyone. However, people downloaded 700 GB per month (you have to try...) from some companies without cutting the speed.

The author on Tele2 used about 170 GB of 4G Internet last month and there were no restrictions. And after reaching the 100 GB threshold, almost any operator will probably begin to analyze your traffic and apply restriction methods if you use the Internet too intensively. Long questions and pestering of the operator actually confirmed this: “When a subscriber creates a large load on the network, the speed may be limited until the day the statistics on the server are reset.” But they seem to have an honest unlimited limit.

Conclusion

As you have already seen, the most effective way to save traffic is to buy a more expensive tariff. And all super compressors not only degrade the quality and make the Internet more sluggish, but they also don’t always save as much as possible. But if there is no way out, then they will help you save something.

Last updated by at February 9, 2017.