How many gigabytes a month you actually need

Gigabytes are not spent by “the phone” but by particular activities, and the spread between them is two hundredfold. An hour of music is 43 megabytes; an hour of 4K video is nearly nine gigabytes. So the answer to “how much do I need” comes not from a feeling but from simple multiplication: hours a day × usage per hour × 30.

Below: what an hour of each activity weighs, three profiles with a gigabyte total, how to stay inside the package, and what spends traffic while you are not touching the phone at all.

Neither YouTube nor Zoom publishes usage in gigabytes per hour — they publish a recommended speed. From that you can work out an upper bound, and that is enough to see the orders of magnitude. YouTube gives 0.7 Mbps for 360p, 1.1 for 480p, 2.5 for 720p, 5 for 1080p and 20 Mbps for 4K. Which means an hour of video at 360p is no more than 315 MB, at 720p about 1.1 GB, at 1080p about 2.2 GB and at 4K about 8.8 GB. Now the part that breaks intuition: a video call spends not more than video but noticeably less. Zoom recommends 1.2 Mbps for a one-to-one call at 720p, which is about 540 MB an hour — four times less than an hour of YouTube at 1080p. Turn the camera off and 60–80 kbps is left, or 27–36 MB an hour: less than an hour of video even at 360p. Screen sharing without video fits into the same 50–75 kbps. Downloads count separately, and they count themselves: a file from Telegram spends exactly its own size — a 1.5 GB film is 1.5 GB of traffic, however many times you open it afterwards. That gives you a quick test of your own package: 20 GB is roughly 9 hours of 1080p video a month, or 18 hours at 720p; 50 GB is about 23 hours at 1080p, but only five and a half hours at 4K. Which is why the video quality setting inside an app changes your usage more than any other habit.

Exactly three things are worth counting in numbers: video, music and calls — they are the ones services publish a recommended speed for. Messengers, maps, email and banking apps publish nothing of the kind, so they belong in the calculation as headroom rather than as a line. The practical version: add up video, music and calls, add 15–20 per cent, and compare that with your package.

A profile is built from three habits: how much video a day and at what quality, how much music, and how many calls. Everything else — messengers, maps, banking, email — barely registers next to video. The figures below are the upper bound, so they already include headroom.

Now the point of the whole calculation — the price. The 10 GB profile is covered by UZMOBILE Mobile Mini M and OQ TAKOYCHA, both at 45,000 UZS a month. The 40 GB profile is formally closest to Perfectum Qulay 6 — 45 GB for 130,000 UZS — but Beeline YORQIN gives 70 GB for 70,000: more volume at almost half the price. The 100 GB profile is covered by Mobiuz Mazza 70, which gives 150 GB for that same 70,000 UZS, while Ucell Bor 110 adds 100 GB on the 5G network to its 200 GB for 110,000.

Hence a conclusion that matters more than the arithmetic itself: a hundred gigabytes here is not “mobile instead of home internet” but the middle of the mass-market range at the price of an ordinary tariff. How to compare tariffs from there is in the guide to picking a tariff by what you actually use.

The last thing worth checking before buying a bigger package: whether the network works where you actually spend it. A 150 GB package is useless in a room where video stalls on buffering, and what helps there is a coverage and speed check you run yourself rather than a ranking from an advert. If the gigabytes go at home, it is cheaper to weigh them against home internet; if usage spikes when you travel, look at the terms for roaming and eSIM, where a gigabyte costs something else entirely.