HomePod HomePod data use??

[lowkey]

Hi.
I’ve had my HomePod for a while but just recently moved house. New place doesn’t have a landline so I got a little pocket wifi. As Apple Music doesn’t count towards data use (on Telstra) I figured 10GB would be enough data for the month because all the HomePod is doing is streaming from Apple Music.

but checking my data use and HomePod is using 107MB of data every hour it’s playing!

telstra are doing a check but think it’s the homepods Siri connecting to the Apple servers (and not streaming data from Apple Music).

anyone else had this? I really don’t want to have to use a 40GB plan just to listen to the HomePod each month

 

[dotme]

telstra are doing a check but think it’s the homepods Siri connecting to the Apple servers

And doing what, exactly? I remember when AT&T once tried to blame Siri for phantom data on the iPhone. Ridiculous. Siri sends small audio files of what you said to Apple when you ask it to do something, the file gets processed and intepreted at Apple, and then TEXT is sent back, which is then converted to speech and action(s) via local processing on the local iDevice.

To rack up 107 MB per hour of data usage, you need to be streaming audio constantly for a full hour, usually at around 256Kbps. So it almost has to be Apple Music, whether they say they're counting it or not.

Internet Radio Bandwidth Calculator

Calculate bandwidth usage based on streaming bitrate, listener capacity and time.

www.internet-radio.com

You can run the numbers yourself above. 256Kbps, 1 hour, 1 listener (your Homepod) = 112.5MB, which is close to the 107 you're seeing.

Hope this helps.

 

[boltjames]

At 15 songs per hour and the average 256 quality song being about 9MB in size, that’s 135MB per hour.

So, yes, your usage seems about right for Apple Music.

 

[lowkey]

Thanks 🙏