The future of mobile communication is unarguably data. This is why major telecommunication service providers have been embroiled in data war since mid 2016 and the Nigerian government has opportunistically set their sights on profiting from it by increasing the tariff for data. Though the initial plan was unanimously repelled by the senate, sooner or later Nigerians will wake up to new tariff plans across major telecommunication service providers. To make sure you do not run out of data after paying huge amount in subscription charges, consider these five easy ways to make your data last for you.
Disable automatic picture and video download for Whatsapp: Whatspp is by no doubt the world’s most used instant messaging platform with over 1 billion users in more than 180 countries of the world, proving features for chat, image and video sharing, calls and video calls, etc. The Whatsapp application can also be the reason why your data gets exhausted easily.This is because of its automatic audio, image, and video download. Most of the time, you dont even need these attachments. Choose what you what to download and when. To guard against this, disable automatic picture and video download on your Whatsapp when on cellular network. Set it to download automatically when connected to a wifi. For iPhone, follow the steps below:
>> Open the Whatsapp
>> Click on settings
>> Click on data and storage usage
>> Click on image and set to wifi
>> Do the same thing for audio and video
For Android:
Launch Whatsapp and follow the steps below:
Stop background data usage on Android: Android phones have insatiable appetite for data consumption. This is because even in idle mode, your android phones still consume data through application updates and location sharing. You can set your phone to restrict background data usage by following the steps below:
>> Click on settings
>> Click on mobile networks
>> Data usage
>> Click on the three dots at the top right corner of your screen and choose restrict background usage.
Use ONLY wifi for application updates: Most mobile phone users ignorantly update their apps using cellular connections. The thing is, some of these applications are over 100 Megabytes in size. Updating apps like that on a subscription of 2GB will leave you out of data in less than a week. Most of us have access wifi at work, school, church, or cafe. Make use of wifi when updating your applications and save your data for more precious things.
Use opera mini for video compression: One of the advantages using opera mini is the ability to compress the size of a video as it is being streamed online. Opera mini has a data saving feature which allows viewers to reduce the size of a video by reducing its quality. The qualities range from high, medium to low. Simply download opera mini and set the image quality to medium. This will help save your data. When viewing a video over a wifi connection, you can set it to high, as long as you are not the one paying for the wifi connection. Lol.
Chrome data saver feature: the Chrome data saver feature works by having your downloads compressed by Google servers as most of your traffics pass through them (Google servers). Although https traffics are not included, some websites might face difficulties finding your location, and some images might appear less in quality, less data gets downloaded to your device as a result of the compression. The Chrome data saver feature is not available for iPhones. To enable it on Android, do the following:
>> Download, install and launch the chrome application ( download here)
>> Tap the three dots (more)
>> Tap settings
>> Under the advance option, tap data server and enable setting.