Data Usage on a Mobile Device

[Jcyee]

Since I had never played any STG game on my phone without wifi (I'm using 4g through AT&T), I wanted to know how much data each game used, particularly AL. So I found this post the other day about AL (which I would assume relates to other STG games) data usage:

Data usage is <1k/second at the height of combat.

so 60K/ minute = ~3.5 megs/ hour.

Edit: another quote

I'll have to get futumsh to check me on the math, but I think it goes like this:

We push a max of ~1k/second per player. So a minute's play = ~60k. An hour = ~3600k, or ~3.6megs. 1 month of hour-a-day play = ~108000K, or ~108 megs.

So if you played PL 5 hours a day for an entire month, you would consume maybe half a gig.

Please caveat this by understanding that I am not the tech guy, asommers or futumsh would be much better suited to guestimate for me.

Does anyone else have some actual numbers?

Here is the one I found for PL on another forum, which is basically the same post; post #4: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=64376

(I do recognize that a couple of these posts are pretty old, but they are consistent.)

So, naturally I figured it would be no big deal. However, after between 30 and 40 minutes, at the very most, of gameplay, I found that I had used up 21.9 MB. Grant it, this still isn't much and doesn't really affect my data usage significantly; it simply was just not what I was expecting.

So, my question: why did this difference occur?

All thoughts and opinions appreciated,

Jc