My wife and I are running out of data with 40GB!!

[reddington237]

Hi there,
I moved my wife and I from O2 to EE at the end of April 2026.
We each have 40GB of data and after 1 month I have apparently used over 30GB and my wife has used her full allowance.

We were with O2 for 10 years with only 15GB each and we never came anywhere near to using this much!

I have spoken to multiple people from EE and they say things like, 'because it's fastest 5G, you're using more data'. If I watch a 3GB movie, I use 3GB... it doesn't change depending on how fast that 3GB was downloaded!

I was told today that I need to turn off mobile data when I get home to make sure that my WiFi isn't dropping out and falling back to cellular - never had to do this with O2.

The agent said that she could see that YouTube had used 40% (16GB) of my data allowance. I rarely go on Youtube on my phone so I find this very suspicious. 

Why can't I see what my data is being used on and when in the EE app? Surely this is a very useful feature, no?

[Chris_B]

@reddington237  You device should show what app is using what amount of data.  Are you allowing apps to run in the background? If you are this will continue to use data as it’s running in the background even if you put the device down 

and yes 3Gb of data is still 3Gb of data be that over 4G or 5G. 
But are you limiting the resolution of say YouTube ? Higher resolution will consume more data. What could 3Gb on 1080p could be 7Gb on the highest resolution. 

[Peter_W]

Welcome to the Community, @reddington237 

We don't have any way to determine the way your data is used at a network level - we just supply the allowance, then the phone itself decides how and when this is used. 

Also 5G itself makes no difference on the amount of data used, but if you have a faster connection, apps may default to a higher quality (e.g. YouTube resolution or Spotify audio quality) which would use more data due to the larger file sizes.

As @Chris_B mentioned, a lot of phones will have a way of tracking internal usage though, but this differs by operating system.

What kind of phones are you using here?

Peter