How much data does a smart device at home use in a month? I copied the backend for thirty days; only those who can film videos are the big players
just last month added more than twenty smart devices at home. A couple of days ago, he stopped me in the elevator: With so many devices connected to WiFi every day, how much data do you need to use in a month? Should I upgrade my broadband to a bigger plan? I really couldn't answer at the time. When I got home and checked the router's backend, I found the data statistics page lying there, clearly showing how many GB each device used in a month. So I copied it every few days, and after thirty days, I laid out this account and talked about it today.
first separate the two types of traffic: ration money and transportation fees
Before
record the accounts, you need to clarify that smart devices consume two completely different types of data, and when mixed together, it creates a confusing account.
one is heartbeat and reporting . The device regularly tells the manufacturer's server "I'm still alive," the thermometer reports the number of times, the socket shows the switch status, and the door magnet signals the open/close status. How small is this kind of traffic? A single message is several hundred bytes, so even if you submit four times an hour, that's only a few dozen KB per day. I call this food money—you won't starve or get fat. Devices like light bulbs, sockets, and sensors may consume less data than a single photo in a lifetime.
I've calculated
food expenses separately: seven smart sockets and a row of bulbs at home, thirty days totaling less than 50MB, which is a few MB per device per month—not even a fraction of the carrier's app data inventory. So if you buy ten or eight socket bulbs and stack bulbs at home, there's no need to worry about data usage—the router's actual load is what matters most.
other type is cloud storage . Footage captured by cameras is sent to the manufacturer's server, doorbells push video clips, and sweeping maps are uploaded to the robot vacuum. This is a real data transfer; a 15-second 1080P video starts at several hundred KB. The bulk of equipment traffic comes from the handling fee.
distinguish between these two payments, the account becomes clear: devices without cameras or large files basically don't need to be counted for data; The ones with cameras and Cloud Storage are the ones to be watched.
thirty days of ledger: the gap between the three tiers widens by hundreds of times
my main router is the one with an IoT private network, and the combined traffic statistics from both sides roughly show the 30-day total:
| device does | monthly data | |
| the doorway cloud storage camera | detection mode, sixty to seventy times a day | 2.4GB |
| smart doorbell (battery version) | trigger upload 40 to 50 times a day and upload about | 1.9GB |
| children's watch | tracking heartbeat plus WeChat | 287MB |
| sweeping | twice a day to clean logs and maps | 200MB |
| smart speakers | voice commands plus heart rate | dozens of MB |
| socket bulbs | pure heartbeat | each MB |
| Zigbee device | 28 sensors pass through the gateway | 0 |
287MB of the children's watch was tested when I got a card for my child. the main focus was the location and heart rate, and WeChat was second. At the time, I even debated whether to get a 2GB card. Zigbee's batch of sensors is the most worry-free. Temperature, humidity, doors, windows, and people are never directly connected to the router. 28 units are all connected to a single gateway , which consolidates and reports them for you, so you don't touch WiFi at all.
All
together, dozens of smart devices in my home have about 5GB per month. What does that mean? Every time you upgrade your phone's system, the update package is even more than that; Watching a 4K online movie on weekends still takes three to five GB. In other words, FamilyMart's smart devices work all month, but the traffic can't keep up with a movie you watch at night. After I said this amount, Old Sun immediately gave up on the idea of upgrading the set meal.
Big Head is always the ones that shoot videos
the two items in the ledger—cloud storage cameras and doorbells—account for over 80% of the total traffic on my smart devices. The key variable determining the size of this account is not pixels or the number of units, but the of the upload mode.
The one at my doorstep is in detection mode; it only records one segment when someone passes by. Sixty to seventy segments per day, each segment lasting over ten seconds, with a sub-bitrate of about 0.7Mbps, calculates to seventy to eighty MB per day, or 2.4GB per month. How did this bitrate come from? the monitoring and storage article calculated the full bitrate account, the main stream and sub-bitrates differ by more than half. The doorbell 1.9GB is also all triggered by a pile of triggers. The corridor on the first floor is bustling, triggered forty to fifty times a day, each time transmitting a video about twenty seconds long. The single bar looks small, but the number of reactions is overwhelming.
by the way, a word about trigger frequency as a variable. The same doorbell installed on my first floor and in front of my cousin's elevator room can double the monthly traffic — several households pass through the entrance of her building's elevator in one ride. So there's no standard answer to the data log for devices like camera doorbells; it's directly linked to the foot traffic at your doorstep. If you copy it from the backend for a week, it's more accurate than any estimate.
But if one day you accidentally open it and it becomes continuous cloud storage, it's a whole different ledger. A 1080P H.265 main bitrate is about 2Mbps, and the phone runs 24 hours without shutdown: 2 divided by 8, then multiplied by 86,400 seconds. Starting at 21GB per day, or 600-700GB per month. It's two or three hundred times worse than detection mode. The same saying goes, "cameras consume traffic"—detection and continuous data are two different lives.
so before buying a camera, you really need to think carefully about where to store the recordings. local storage (inserted with a card or connected to a NAS), the device almost does not consume broadband data ; For Kaiyun storage, just follow the account above—a single continuous cloud storage camera can cost four years of your other smart devices.
the true traffic assassins are these three
After
the account was done, I checked again where the risks of failure were and found that smart devices themselves are actually clean. The ones that truly drain traffic are these three:
- Continuous Cloud Memory False Opening. Some camera apps don't notify users after the cloud storage trial expires, and by default, they switch to continuous recording. Over 20GB per day, and a 500GB broadband plan won't last more than half a month. Seeing the bill or background app is shocking.
- sneaked off the TV box backstage. My cousin's box stole 70GB of self-updated and pre-cached in a month—more than ten times more than all smart devices combined. wrote about the current methods for stealing data in the article, and the background data page appears as soon as you sort by device.
- mobile cloud album. During the week my mom stayed, her Huawei phone's album automatically synced over WiFi by default, and she uploaded 19GB of photos overnight. The total bandwidth doesn't look huge, but it uses up the uplink bandwidth completely. FamilyMart video conferences get stuck on slideshows, this pitfall was covered in the speed check article.
any one of these three could be equivalent to half a year's worth of all smart devices. The troubleshooting idea is simple: on the router's backend traffic statistics page, sort them down by month, so you can instantly see who has tens of GB—no need to guess.
what kind of talent needs to be accounted for by MB
your home has monthly broadband, you really don't need to worry about 5GB—it's not even a fraction of the total usage. There are three scenarios where you really want to budget every MB:
First, the data card for children's watches. Most market plans range from 100MB to 1GB; the actual 287MB means 1GB is generous, while 500MB is tight, and video calls are charged separately. Second, that uses portable WiFi as broadband, with a total drive of only a few dozen GB. Don't enable features like camera cloud storage—it runs out in three days. Third, second-hand broadband charged by data usage in rental housing, the budget must be estimated before allocating equipment to tenants; otherwise, if it exceeds the limit at the end of the month, who will be responsible for?
province also has three practical data usage tricks: always select clip detection for cloud storage, don't choose continuous recording; Remote preview and substream clipping; don't use the main stream to read hard; Devices with cameras that are rarely used, such as old cameras that have been replaced, simply disconnect from the external network and plug into the IoT private network , allowing only the LAN to watch, with cloud traffic dropping to zero.
give me an order at the end
first go to the router's backend and find the traffic statistics page to check the monthly data for each device; Then focus on whether the upload mode of cloud storage devices is detection or continuous; Monthly broadband users can forget about this at this point, while data card users reconcile accounts once a month. By the way, after listening to the data report, Old Sun turned around and asked me how much electricity cost I paid for so many devices per month—I measured each meter socket one by one in the about the equipment electricity bill inventory, and my conclusion was the same as the data log: the big part is always the big items, and the small devices add up to just a fraction.
