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About this tool
Estimate how much mobile data a trip needs from maps, calls, streaming, social and photo backup habits.
This estimator converts your daily phone habits into a megabyte figure for a whole trip, using the published consumption rates for each activity: about 5 MB per hour of turn-by-turn navigation, 0.7 GB per hour of standard-definition video, 72 MB per hour of 160 kbps music, 5 MB per minute of video calling and 60 MB per minute of 1080p video backup. It adds a configurable network-overhead allowance for headers and retries on weak roaming signal, then recommends a pack size with 20% head-room. It is for travellers choosing between a roaming add-on, an eSIM data plan and a local SIM before they leave.
Open Travel Data Usage Estimator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Every activity uses a documented per-hour or per-minute figure rather than a vague guess.
The breakdown ranks activities by share, so you can see that video streaming or backup dominates everything else.
Totals are in decimal GB (1 GB = 1000 MB), which is how roaming packs and eSIM plans are sold.
About 5 MB per hour of turn-by-turn navigation. Maps streams compressed vector tiles and traffic updates rather than images, so a full day of driving costs roughly 40 MB. Downloading an offline map area first cuts even that to near zero.
For a typical traveller who uses maps, messaging, some social scrolling and light streaming, 5 to 10 GB covers a week. Streaming one hour of HD video a day alone adds about 8.4 GB over seven days, so the answer swings entirely on whether you watch video on mobile data.
Yes — it is often the largest single item. A HEIC photo is around 2 MB and a JPEG around 3.5 MB, but recorded video is the real cost: 1080p at 30 fps is about 60 MB per minute and 4K about 190 MB per minute. Setting backup to Wi-Fi only is the single biggest saving on a trip.
Real usage runs above payload because of TCP and TLS headers, retried requests on a weak roaming signal, app background refresh and OS updates. The tool applies a 10% overhead by default; raise it towards 15-20% if you expect patchy coverage, and check your carrier's own usage meter rather than the phone's counter, since the two are measured differently.