Corelinx Travel Data Calculator

Most answers to how much data a trip needs are a single number. This one shows its working. You set the trip length and how many hours a day you spend on maps, social media, video streaming, video calls, music and browsing, and the page multiplies each by a published average: 1.5 GB an hour for video, 400 MB for video calls, 300 MB for social media, 80 MB for music, 60 MB for browsing and 50 MB for maps. It adds 60 MB a day for chat and notifications, then a 20% buffer. With the default settings, a seven-day trip comes out at 8.4 GB and the page suggests a 10 GB plan.

The daily breakdown is the useful part. It lists each activity by megabytes per day, so you can see where the data goes. Video is the big one: two hours of it uses more than a full day of everything else at the default settings. There are light, medium and heavy presets if you don't want to set each row yourself, and a hotspot option for sharing data with a laptop or a second phone.

The calculator lives on Corelinx's site, which sells travel eSIM plans, and the result links straight to plans for your destination. The FAQ adds some general guidance. It puts a typical week of maps, chat, social media and some video at about 5 GB, and says that past roughly 20 GB a daily unlimited plan is usually cheaper, though those plans slow down after a daily full-speed cap. The same site has a free travel planner and an eSIM compatibility checker.

It suits anyone about to buy a data plan for a trip who wants a number based on their own habits, whether or not they end up buying from Corelinx. The averages are fixed, and uploads aren't one of the rows, so if you stream in high definition or back up a lot of photos over mobile data, treat the result as a starting point and size up.