I set up my android phone this morning to act as a mobile hotspot and have stopped updates etc. Despite only viewing a few sites on the laptop with no streaming whatsoever I am surprised to find that I’ve already used over 500 megabytes .Can anyone suggest why this would be as when browsing using my phone it consumes very little data?

Desktop sites contain much more data than optimised mobile sites?

It is a work laptop? Do you have Outlook on it, talking to Exchange?

Did you tell your laptop it was a metered connection? Doing this should, in theory, shut down all the background processes that can chew data. Outlooks is good cuprit (Oh, i’ll just go off and refresh the local data cache because everthing will probably have changed since i last downloaded it last night).

It could also be trying to download updates.

The amount of crud on websites nowadays can be horrendous. Badly optimised pictures and, in some case, pulling down several tons of javascript libraries in order to save a dev a bit of effort.
Plus disabling all updates can be a nightmare depending on what you have installed eg forgetting about Steam if you like games could be rather expensive.

Is all the data for the hotspot and not for the phone?

Don’t forget all the random calls to third part metrics websites that websites have in their page metadata. it might not be a huge amount of data, but it will all add up

Slight hijack but I’ve had a similar thing.

We have a 4g wifi and have been using it to watch TV via a MacBook. The other day I used a windows laptop instead and it ate through data like nothing else !

Same iplayer being used, same ish duration of tv watched.

I’m guessing it’s very difficult to limit what is automatically downloaded on a windows pc/laptop

FunkyDunc – Member
I’m guessing it’s very difficult to limit what is automatically downloaded on a windows pc/laptop

Ticking ‘metered connection’ on the connection settings box thingy should do the trick for disabling background downloads of OS updates and such. Not sure if applications bother to honour the setting though.

Another possibility in your case however is that the Windows PC was using HD iPlayer streams and the Mac not.

Can you get Little Snitch for windows?

That tells you everything that is trying to phone home, and you can kill it if you like.

Doesn’t help if it just websites though…

on a 4G network in the mountains I use ca. 1.5 Gb of data per hour using an ipad connecting to a iphone set up for hotspot

The other day I used a windows laptop instead and it ate through data like nothing else !

Could be that it started downloading Windows Updates?

Set the connection to be metered already so no auto updates theoretically.Don’t use outlook either.Every few visits to websites seems to clock another 100mb on the counter…could understand if it were video but not viewed any.Now in desperation using Opera in turbo mode on the laptop and Opera mini in high/extreme mode on the phone which is supposed to reduce consumption.Can’t understand it..hardly use any data when using phone for light browsing in UK but I’m currently roaming in Spain .Maybe I’ll disable all images if it goes on like this cos I had 5gb which I thought would be loads but at this rate!