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About this tool
Estimate how much mobile data a trip needs from maps, calls, streaming, social and photo backup habits.
The Travel Data Usage 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.
Enter Trip length (days), then Navigation (hours/day) at 5 MB per hour, Video streaming, Music / podcasts and Social feeds hours per day.
Add Video calls and Voice / VoIP calls in minutes per day, Background apps (MB/day), photo and video backup settings and a Network overhead (%).
Read Estimated data for the whole trip and the recommended GB pack with head-room, then press Copy result.
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.