Data Usage Questions

Thanks for that.  I already read this page.  My questions are more specific than what this page offers.

What I am concerned about is that over the past several days for the exception of Thursday, I've been using only 11 gigs of Internet data per day.  On Thursday however, I learned that I used 42 gigs.  My usage has been the same outside of casting a live streaming video from my Android phone to my Roku TV for approximately 1 hour.  On Friday, my data usage returned back to 11 gigs.  I did not cast any videos on Friday. 

Now, according to a specific website, 40 gigs of Internet data should give me the following:

With your 40GB of data, you'll be able to browse the internet for approximately 480 hours per month, to stream 8,000 songs online or to watch 80 hours of online video in standard definition.

There is absolutely no way that I could have used 42 gigs in a day after watching a couple of movies as I have done on the other days.  So, how could I have used all this data?  Could casting videos account for all this data usage?  Obviously, since I have a data cap, I need to prevent this from occurring in the future.  Thanks.

My android in on the wireless network.  All my devices (Laptop, Smartphone, and Roku TV) are on the same wireless network using COX Panoramic Wifi.  When I go on the MyWifi page, the Smartphone doesn't show much wifi data usage, even on the Thursday in question.

It seems to me almost impossible to have consumed 42 gigs in one day just by browsing the Internet and watching a couple of Youtube videos including the 1-hour video that I casted on Thursday regardless of the video format.

It seems to me almost impossible to have consumed 42 gigs

It depends on what you watched.  UHD?  UHD at 30 frames per second?  UHD at 60 frames per second?  UHD at MPEG-2 or MPEG-4?

For example, if you watched an hour of UHD at 60 frames per second, it would total over 110 billion bits of data...or 14 GB.

I know that on Thursday, the day in question, we watched a couple of 4x Ultra HD Youtube videos from Pro Walk Tours, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNzul4dnciIlDg8BAcn5-cQ for around 2 to 4 hours.  MyWifi showed soom peaking around that time frame.  We watch the Youtube videos from the Youtube App on the Roku TV.  These videos were not casted. Do you think that these videos are responsible for using a good cunch of 40 gigs?

I think that I found the answer.  According to an article I just found on the Internet:

'According to Netflix, you use 1 GB of data per hour when you stream a standard definition (SD) video. High definition (HD) videos, on the other hand, use 3 GB per hour. And 4K Ultra HD streams use up to 7 GB per hour of video. This means you’ll use around 2 GB to stream a two-hour SD movie, 6 GB to stream the HD version or 14 GB for the 4K stream. A half-hour TV show would be 500 MB for the SD version, 1.5 GB for the HD version or 3.5 GB for 4K'

So, if this paragraph of the article is correct and we watched these type of videos for 4 hours, I would have used 28 gigs of data just on the videos itself.  Thank you for your assistance.

I'll assume the article is correct for Netflix because their calculations assume the applicable codec and compression schemes of Netflix.  YouTube would use their codecs and compression.

I don't know what a "4x Ultra HD" video would be.  However, UHD-4K is 3840 × 2160 pixels and UHD-8K is 7680 × 4320 pixels.  By comparing 8K to 4K, although the horizontal and vertical pixels double, the total megapixels quadruple.

4K:  3840 × 2160 = 8,294,400 pixels
8K:  7680 × 4320= 33,177,600 pixels
33,177,600 / 8,294,400 = 4

UHD with a factor of 4 would definitely account for a spike in data.  Be careful!

Some devices...perhaps Roku...allow you to set the maximum allowable resolution for streaming, such as 720p or 1080p only.  That way, you'd get no surprises.  If not an option on your device, perhaps in a streaming account.