Trip calculator: find the data plan that fits your travel

A gigabyte is roughly 1.5 hours of standard-definition video, 11 hours of scrolling an image-and-clip feed, 14 hours of streamed music, or 205 hours of turn-by-turn navigation.

Those are averages for the medium, not a measurement of your phone. Higher video quality, a big screen and background app refresh all push the real figure up.

It depends entirely on what you do with it. 5 GB is about 7.3 hours of video, or 57 hours of social feeds, or 85 hours of ordinary web browsing.

For a traveler using maps, messaging and the occasional feed, 5 GB comfortably covers a two-week trip. For someone streaming video on the train every day, it is closer to a long weekend.

For most travel days, yes. Navigation, messaging, boarding passes, ride apps and a modest amount of browsing rarely pass 500 MB in a day.

It stops being enough the moment video enters the picture — one hour of streaming is most of a gigabyte on its own. If you expect to watch or make video calls daily, size for that instead.

About 15 hours of video, 23 hours of video calls, or 114 hours of social feeds.

For a single traveler it is a generous month of ordinary use. Shared over a hotspot with a laptop, expect it to go considerably faster — tethered devices do not throttle themselves.

Around 73 hours at standard definition. At high definition it is a fraction of that: HD roughly triples the rate, and 4K roughly triples it again.

This is the single biggest lever on any data estimate. Dropping your streaming app to a lower quality setting over mobile data is worth more than any other saving you can make.

Budget about 700 MB an hour at 480p. 720p is roughly double that, 1080p roughly triple, and audio-only playback is closer to 75 MB an hour.

YouTube picks the quality automatically from your connection, so a fast 5G signal will cost you more data than a weak 4G one for exactly the same video.

Roughly 450 MB an hour per person for a full-screen call — FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom and Meet are all in the same range.

Turning your own camera off cuts it dramatically, because the outgoing video stream is most of the cost. A voice-only call is closer to 30 MB an hour.

Your internet stops. There is no surprise bill and no overage charge — that is the whole point of a prepaid eSIM.

You can add days or data to the same eSIM from your dashboard without installing anything new, so under-estimating costs you a couple of minutes rather than a trip.

A fixed plan is one price for a set allowance over a set number of days, and it is usually the cheaper way to cover a trip you can size accurately.

An unlimited day pass is billed per day and keeps working after the daily allowance, at a reduced speed. It is the better choice when you genuinely cannot predict your usage, or when the trip is short.