How Much Internet Does Skype Use – Bandwidth and Data Usage

How Much Internet Does Skype Use, skype is the most popular text, voice over IP and video chat apps. Traditional phone calls are too expensive.

Its bandwidth depends on the kind of call you do with Skype: video or audio, one-on-one call or a group call.

Skype’s features vary according to your needs it does not matter if you want to send text messages, instant message or make video chats; plus you may want to share documents or photos.

Many Skype users complain about data usage, which is obviously down to nobody’s fault.

This being said, we understand that a good number of these complaints stem from a lack of awareness regarding the amount of data Skype actually uses.

You can also install Skype for Android or Windows Phone for video calls. This is fine for normal video calls, which only require a 300Kbps connection, with a download speed of 40kbps.

However, this isn’t enough bandwidth to run an HD video call. If you want an HD video call, you’ll need 1.5Mbps download and upload speeds – just like on the computer.

Once you are on limited bandwidth, it’s important to be economical with your app and software usage.

This is because of the possibility that the recipient’s computer may be consuming bandwidth without their knowledge, which at the end of the day can cause your receiver’s estimates to be substantially higher than they had predicted.

But if you have more than one person on a live-video conference, you need to have more bandwidth.

For example, if you have six people in a video call, you should have at least 10 megabits of connection speed in order to take care of an important file transfer for your team members who may be on an official network like Skype for Business.

This generally happens to your mobile devices and smartphones. While all OS like Android, iOS and Windows OS come equipped with precautionary measures to save bandwidth on your device.

It’s important that you be aware of apps or website that are using expensive data-driven services to potentially damage your experience.

How much Bandwidth Usage does Skype consume?

One way to reduce bandwidth (like with Skype) is through a byte-based approach using some sort of proxy, but connections can get lost when there’s a problem with the handshake, probably so it’s advisable to pursue another method.

The satisfied answer looked something like this:

The average Skype download speed was 12.1mbps with an upload speed of 0.75mbps.

Net limiter displays statistics of about 6 kb up, 6 kb down per second.

on average 43.2mb per hour,

The above usage estimates are for Skype voice and video calls only.

For Skype Video The results of the test are as follows: 1 minute of video calling was measured at 3.4MB.

To put this into perspective, you can send and receive around 100 minutes of video to and from each other a day before hitting your daily limit for data usage (we assume one video call every hour).

Finally, I Suggest, Use Netlimiter (netlimiter.com if I recall correctly).

In the later days, I have come across a post which contains different surprising facts.

It states that Skype is made in such a way that it automatically adjusts itself to connect at an optimal rate depending on your Internet speed connection.

Video calls require bandwidth to work and back in the day, when internet speeds averaged around 1mbit/s, it was common for a video call to consume up to 3GB per hour.

Thankfully with the advent of high-speed internet connections, those figures have come down.

Nowadays, it’s atypical for a video call to overuse your broadband connection or mobile data allocation by more than 500MB per hour.

According to a recent report, using Skype on both an audio and video call combined will use somewhere between 200-300 megabytes (depending on circumstances) of data per hour.

With voice calls only using around 40-50 megabytes.

How much Data does Skype Use?

These are the rough estimations of Skype’s data usage for audio and video calls.

min – minimum , rec- recommended (or maximum)

Audio or Voice Only Calls

• Calling (min) .22 MB/min
• Calling (rec) .73 MB/min

How much Data does a Video Call use

• Video call (min) .94 MB/min
• The video call (rec) 2.12 MB/min
• Video call HQ (min) 2.93 MB/min
• The video call HQ (rec) 3.66 MB/min
• Video Call HD (min) 8.78 MB/min
• The video Call HD (rec) 10.98 MB/min

Max Idle bandwidth per Skype client running 1.35 GB/month (Skype running 24/7)

We have provided you with rough estimates below for data usage on calls over Skype to help you avoid nasty bills.

1. Skype-to-Skype: 50kbps or around 3MB for one minute of calling
2. Calls to landlines or mobile numbers: 6-20 kbps or around 1MB for one minute of calling
3. Video calls between two mobile devices: 500kbps
4. Video calls between a mobile device and a computer: 600kbps

What is 1 hour skype call data usage like?

This again depends on whether the call is audio or video. You can see the rest of the section, to know video data usage. But, for approximate usage at 100 kbps Skype calls is:

• 0.75 MB per min
• 7.5 MB per 10 mins
• 22.5 MB per 30 mins
• 45 MB per hour

But this too varies by situation. If you are communicating on a call, it’s not just the sending of information that counts – you could be sending and receiving simultaneously.

So try not to startle fellow drivers: Some calls may take up to 90 megabytes per hour if your communication isn’t one-sided.

How much is the Skype Video Call Data usage?

Skype provides you with a set of options when it comes to how you want to call other people on the internet.

There are different kinds of resolution quality, but within each quality option Skype will automatically select the best possible quality based upon your or the person you’re calling’s internet connection, camera, operating system and factors like that.

If we take the numbers above into account, you will use the following amount of data in a 1-hour Skype video call.

• Standard Video Call – 60 MB (min), 130 MB (rec)
• HQ (high quality) Video Call – 180 MB (min), 220 MB (rec)
• HD (high definition) Video Call – 550 MB (min), 700 MB (rec)

The results above are from a theoretical point-of-view, and yes that’s true. But as you may have noticed as an observer of the /Skype Community forum, these case studies look more like this:

Practical Case-Study

In the summer of 2013, to make a Skype video call on iPad via Verizon LTE, it took around 2GB per hour.

However, in a recent post from April 2015 on Android tablets and smart phones, many users complained that Skype was using double the data.

This is likely the case if you consider both bandwidth usage as well as file size of your end-product.

In 2015, most computers and webcams are strong, so we expect HD video calls every time Skype updates. And I think even if you made 1:1 video call, Skype will come up to 700 MB per hour for the video call by both parties.

If you include a group of 7 + people on a group call, then it brags before 4 GB. When have you considered both sides send/receive communication, its 8 GB per hour. My mobile data plan can be consumed very quickly.

If you want to find out how much Skype has been doing on your computer, download Netlimiter from another trusted source.

What is the Average Skype Data usage for Voice over Data Calls?

A recent study done by Android-Authority recently published a report about which apps consume the most amount of data to make a call on Android phones.

It turns out that Skype consumes the most amount of data when it comes to voice calls placed over a 4G network.

For the sake of comparison, they used 5 different people who called each other 10 times each, with each person in a different location just to ensure that they could obtain sufficient and accurate results.

Using a voice call on average utilizes 45 megabytes worth of data and lets say one video call uses around 130 megabytes, simple as that. Now if it’s two-way, this amount is swiftly doubled.

What is Skype?

Skype is an internet telephony (VoIP) service with text and video chat capabilities that allow its users to communicate via the Internet.

It was first developed by Estonian developers during 2004, and was later acquired by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion.

What Skype Can do?

You can anonymously buy phone credit on this service and use that to call someone’s mobile or landline from the comfort of your home computer or laptop.

But if both the caller and receiver are using Skype then you can chat, make audio and video calls for free.

However, you should be wary about consuming too much bandwidth when using Skype because it does not give you a breakdown of how much internet memory you have used during such interactions.