What I don’t know about cell / mobile phones is … a lot.
I will, though, hugely benefit for a few months from knowing the live traffic situation – fwiw, Google maps has been terrific for me when I have used it.
I will want to access live traffic data for many hours a week – maybe 40, this is obv. different from sat nav (much of which can be done with downloaded maps).
I buy a monthly phone plan that has various cost points relating to data useage, and would like to understand how much data I use by accessing Google maps live traffic
I don’t even know the difference between what I use and ‘wifi’ so please talk to me in pretty simple terms
Of course, we don’t know how much data you have in your plan or how much you pay for data so it might be hard to figure out exactly how much the navigation data you’d use and how much it would cost you.
The distinction between wifi and cellular data is important. Your cell phone company only charges you for data that you use when you are connected to their network. Your cell phone can connect to the cell phone network pretty much anywhere so it’s really convenient. Alternatively, you can connect to a wifi network and you will not pay the cell phone company for the data you use. Your phone will have an indicator to tell you when you are connected to wifi (my indicator looks something like an old-fashioned hand fan). You can google your phone name and model and “how to connect to wifi” to learn how to connect your phone to a wifi network and save on data charges.
Generally, you can connect to a wifi network only when you are very close to the wifi transmitter (like say in the same house or coffee shop) so it’s not useful when you are driving around. Secondly, most wifi networks are password protected so you need to know the password before you can connect to it. Finally, even if you are “lucky” enough to find an unsecured wifi network that doesn’t require a password, there is a chance that it will either be clogged with other users and too slow to be useful or that it will present security risks that you don’t want to take. I suggest that you use only trusted wifi networks like the one at your house, your friends’ houses or your office.
On an Android phone, under settings, is a section on Data Usage. In it you can have your phone monitor how much cellular data you are using. You can configure the monitoring period to match your billing period, and set a data limit to match your plan’s data cap. Note that this monitoring is what the phone thinks it’s using - it may not match exactly what the phone network thinks you’re using. It should be pretty close, but it’s not official for billing purposes. This section will also show you how much data each individual app is using, so you can just use Maps for a few days, then check how much data it’s used, and multiply that usage out over your billing purpose to see if it’s likely to cause problems.
If you’re not going to be travelling randomly very far away google maps lets you download maps for specific areas. Do this while on wifi and I believe it will reduce usage, although I don’t know by how much and how much of map data is cached anyway.
Yes, you can download the maps, but not the real-time traffic. But I’m not sure whether you can overlay real-time traffic over a downloaded map. It might be that the whole shebang has to be streaming.
For 40 hours a week of live traffic you’ll be using a ton of data. If you’re in one location with a WiFi connection that data will be free. If you’re driving around using mobile data it’ll cost you dearly.
For that much usage you might consider purchasing a stand alone unit like a Garmin. Model numbers ending in LMT have lifetime maps and traffic and will show some traffic data without any data plan it charges. I’m not sure if it’ll show as much data as Google maps or enough information for your purposes but it’s worth looking into.
I’m not sure that’s the case. My phone currently shows Maps as having used 32MB since the 1st. The virtually all of that is from 2 2.5h stints of highway driving. That’s 6.4MB/hr, which would extrapolate out to a bit over 1GB for a month at 40hrs/wk. That’s quite a bit, but whether that constitutes a “ton” relative to one’s plan depends heavily on the plan. And I have no idea if my data usage would be comparable to the OP’s. I was travelling 120km/h, and I presume downloaded many more square km of map than someone driving about a city would, but there was basically no traffic data in my case. The OP should monitor Maps’ data usage as I described in my previous post and see if it is actually an issue.
Maps don’t use a lot of data. Traffic condition reporting uses a lot less than that. The information I’ve been able to find indicates that Google mapping data is a few megabytes per hour of driving, although this will depend on where you’re driving and how fast. If maps were downloaded and all you were accessing over the cellular network is traffic data, I’d be surprised if it were more than a few kilobytes per hour.
My own experience is that Google maps uses about 1gb per hour when I’m navigating, even on downloaded maps. If not for traffic, where else is that data going?
I don’t know what my traffic usage is, but it’s not even close to that. And I drive for Uber about 30 hours a week and Google Maps is on the whole time, and I buy data one gig at a time from Tracfone. A gig usually lasts more than a month. And I do a lot of web browsing during that time too, the part dedicated to navigation is only a part of that gig.
Yeah, that can’t be right. I just drove from Missouri to Florida with Google Maps running most of the time (had to be at least 12 hours running). My total usage for the month is not even 0.5GB yet.
A quick net search indicates it actually a negligible amount of data (well under 20MB per hour) unless you have satellite views turned on or something like that.
Did you mean 1MB per hour? That seems pretty realistic. In the thread I linked to, I used perhaps 3MB per hour but that was driving straight away from my starting point as fast as I could. That probably means I was downloading a lot of map data relative to someone driving around his or her neighborhood more slowly and just repeatedly covering the same ground using the same maps.