Extremely high data traffic usage by MS Teams on 4G

[Kyryll1985]

Yesterday MS Teams used 9 Gb of data over a 50 minute video call on 4G. Completely maxed out my monthly bundle. This is extremely high and very far from the official 270 Mb per hour that I see published online. In this time frame all I did on my laptop is this one MS Team call with multiple participants and screen sharing. I have no other applications that download anything or use remote servers for encryption of data or VPNs. Below are logs from My Vodafone data usage in those 50 minutes that I had that call. 

28 Sep 20 - 17:50 Internet 1001.49 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 17:37 Internet 310.00 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 17:35 Internet 1000.00 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 17:31 Internet 1000.00 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 17:27 Internet 975.86 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 17:24 Internet 1000.00 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 17:16 Internet 1000.00 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 17:15 Internet 1000.00 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 17:11 Internet 1000.00 MB £0.00
28 Sep 20 - 16:58 Internet 1000.00 MB £0.00

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Kyryll1985 ,

I know this is not an answer as such and is probably far from ideal but it is worth noting that:

data consumption in each audio/video call or meeting will vary based on several factors, such as video layout, video resolution, and video frames per

And you could significantly reduce data usage by turning off video.

I would also look to:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/fqhawi/microsoft_teams_mobile_data_usage/

And:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network#bandwidth-requirements

Thanks

Henry

[#3]

4 years later...

Note if you tether your laptop to the internet via your phone (hotspot, bluetooth or USB), the operating system might use your data bundle indiscriminately to download system updates in the background. It is most likely that system updates were to blame for your high data usage rather than Teams itself. In Windows 10 or higher you can view your data usage per application and per connection in the Settings app (just search for Data Usage). You can also set data limits there to prevent this from happening. Additionally look for "Network status" in Settings, click on a connections properties and activate "Set as metered connection", which will result in very conservative data use; making it almost unnecessary to even set data limits.