WhatsApp Video Call data consumption – How much data is used per minute?

WhatsApp video calling is now official and you can make free video calls without having to use any other third party app when you use WhatsApp as your primary chat app with most of your contacts. For the initial days, expect the call quality to be a bit patchy because of the high load caused by the users who are trying to check how things work with it.

But, we tried to use a couple of apps to check the data consumption on Jio 4G, Airtel 4G and Tata Docomo 3G to see how much data is used per minute of the WhatsApp call and how does the call quality keep up. Let’s see what are the results.

Note: We cannot guarantee that these should be the same result and data usage for everyone because it also depends on the network you are on, and the speeds you are getting, but the data usage should be quite close to what we found.

While we tried the different network providers, the data used was almost the same and to be true, the video feed was quite blurry and low on quality, and there could be two reasons for this – low speeds, or low camera quality. The camera cannot be questioned here as we used the OnePlus 3, Huawei P9, and the Xiaomi Mi Max here.

Now, the data consumption – On an average, it was about 2.9MB to 3.4MB of data used per minute for the video call done through WhatsApp. If this is calculated with the current data costs of about Rs. 250 per GB of 4G data on Airtel, you would get about five hours of video call (around 320 minutes) and the cost for the same is less than a rupee per minute of WhatsApp video call.

Considering that the app is offering the video calling for free, this is still advantageous over the regular voice calls if you wanted to have a direct face-talk and if you are on a broadband network and having Wi-Fi connectivity, you don’t have to bear the high data costs as well.

Just to repeat what we mentioned above, the video call data consumption could be lesser or higher for others, but this should nearly be the average usage that you should get.