How Much Data does WhatsApp Use? (With Calculator)

This post explains how much data and bandwidth is required by WhatsApp. We also provide a calculator that let’s you calculate your total WhatsApp data consumption.

Summary

A one minute WhatsApp voice call uses 720 kilobytes. A one minute WhatsApp video call uses 15 MB. The longer the call, the greater the amount of data consumed.

Use the calculator below to calculate how much data is consumed based on usage.

Calculator

Enter the amount of time spent on either

• Voice calling or
• Video calling

The tool will provide the total data with the desired units

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Example Calculation

A one minute WhatsApp voice call uses 720 kilobytes.

A one minute WhatsApp video call uses 15 MB.

A Whatsapp video call therefore uses over 20 times more data than a voice call. Something to remember if you have a data cap or your carrier limits the amount of data you can download and upload every month.

Background

WhatsApp bandwidth consumption depends on

• whether it is a voice or video call and
• the app settings

For instance when you select Use Less Data for Calls within the app settings, expect the bandwidth numbers to be lower than what’s provided below.

Voice Calls

WhatsApp uses the Opus audio coding format. The bandwidth required for voice calls on both the uplink and downlink is 48 kbps.

Opus supports bit rates between 6 kbps and 510 kbps. For mono audio applications, the bit rate is 30 kbps and for stereo it can be as high as 100 kbps. For VoIP calls, 24 kbps is the recommended bit rate for full band. Considering overhead due to Ethernet packets, the required bandwidth is higher at 48 kbps.

Video Calls

WhatsApp uses Advanced Video Coding or H.264 codec for video calls. We tested video calling and found a five minute call consumed a total of 77.8 Megabytes. See the picture below.

A WhatsApp video call therefore uses (77.8*8)/(2*5*60) = 1 Megabit per second on either the the uplink or downlink using the data transfer rate calculator.

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Data consumption vs Bandwidth

In the above calculator we used either typical codec bandwidth (specified in kbps) or measured numbers and used that in conjunction with the call duration to find the total data consumption (in Megabyte).

Bandwidth is sometimes referred to as throughput.

A question that comes up often is – what’s the difference between bandwidth measured in kbps, Mbps or Gbps and data use measured in MB or GB?

Data usage as the term suggests, measures the total amount of data consumed when you’re using a mobile device (laptop, tablet, phone). Note that a device can continue to consume data in the background – even when you’re not actively using it.

When you download a PDF file for example that is 10 MB in size, the total data downloaded is 10 MB. It will be a little more in practice due to overhead associated with data packets used to carry that information.

Streaming applications like YouTube on the other hand might adjust the quality of audio over a lower speed link.

Units for data usage: kilobytes (kB), Megabytes (MB), Gigabytes (GB) and Terabytes (TB).

Bandwidth is a measure of how fast data is transferred to and from your mobile device. A larger bandwidth number indicates faster data transport. WhatsApp does not provide any guidance on bandwidth requirements. We had to do some digging to find the codec and the requirements based on that. What we learned is that it is variable and adapts to the quality of the connection.

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WhatsApp Data Consumption Table

The following table shows the data used in Megabytes for Voice and Video calling.