For example, my phone company provides me a total 2gb of data within my plan for a total month.
The word data gets confusing for this varied use.
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Data is the plural of datum.
A datum is an atom of information, the smallest amount of information that still makes sense.
But in your case, it means “how many bytes we’re willing to transmit to your phone at high speed per month”.
Which isn’t true in the strictest sense of the word. With modern phone networks everything is data and the phone is continually both sending and receiving bytes. These don’t count towards the data budget. Usually it’s the amount of data excluding metadata that has been exchanged with the wider internet. Or sometimes even only the amount of data downloaded. These usually exclude all of the overhead and instead focus on actual package contents being transmitted. Now this can get very complicated when looking into stuff like a VPN and compressed data packages.
I’m sure the provider has some technical definition internally of how these metrics are collected and how the accounting works. But this isn’t something they will share with the outside world. There would probably be a legal document somewhere that states they are using industry standard means of collecting those stats. Depending on where you live there might be strict definitions the provider needs to adhere to.
As for the question posted by OP: This is way too vague of a question. If you ask a more specific question, you can receive a better answer. Data is one of those words with a whole bunch of meanings, depending on the context. If you strip the context, you also strip the meaning.
You have to start by understanding that for mobile phone companies, they are using an extremely specific and industry-focused definition of “data” that relates ONLY to the way mobile phone networks are implemented and billed.
If you are trying to understand it purely from any sort of more general, widespread definition of “data” which is what most people seem to be describing below, there are way too many steps and details between that and what the mobile phone company calls “data” for you to wrap your head around in a single question.
So I’m going to tell you what data means to a mobile phone company:
It means ANY internet traffic you use (upload or download) on your phone (or if you are sharing your phone as a hotspot, any used by the hotspot) AS LONG AS all of the following are true:
- That internet data is not for the purposes of sending and receiving phone calls to your carrier-assigned phone number across the carrier’s own telephony network (ie, it is a “regular” phone call, you have no control over how the carrier routes its voice calls but even if they do route it across the internet, typically you will not be charged data for this)
- It is not a SMS text message, and
- You are not on WiFi at the time (the WiFi goes through somebody else’s physical internet connection where the WiFi is connected to, not your phone’s).
There are exceptions and edge cases, but as a general rule, that’s what a mobile phone company will consider “data”. Anything you upload or download or stream on the internet almost always qualifies, unless you’re on a WiFi connection like at home or work, assuming you have that WiFi connection enabled. Youtube is data. Netflix is data. Emails are data. Phone calls can be data, if you’re using an “app” like WhatsApp or FaceTime or VOIP or any sort of video-calling feature.
It is measured in millions (mega) or billions (giga) of bytes. Text and static images, like wikipedia and many other webpages are, use negligible and almost irrelevant amounts of data. Apps, app and OS updates, streaming audio and especially downloading or even just playing games and video content (movies, TV shows, video calls) use very significant amounts of data and can quickly use up the quota in hours depending on the quality settings.
To tack on to this:
SMS requires practically no transmission cost, as it is embedded in an unassigned portion of the frames being sent between the phone and tower - frames which are always being sent anyway for keep-alive, registration, etc. There’s some infrastructure required (SMS gateway, network to other cell companies) so it’s not completely a sunk cost for them.
MMS historically worked the same way, just the media was base-64 encoded, and required an http server to temporarily host the media files for the person you were sending to.
Begin the age of the smart phone and data plans - now MMS are sent via the data connection because it’s much faster and doesn’t consume voice channel time, leaving more voice channels available for voice calls.
Today SMS is still largely sent the old way, but with 4G/5G the connection is completely different (it doesn’t use the same framing), so effectively it’s being sent via the data connection.
Voice is generally no longer via a voice channel, but really VOIP - vendors have pushed for voice-over-data since the beginning of 4G (I think LTE doesn’t even have voice channels anymore, 5G definitely doesn’t - it’s all essentially VOIP).
This is all from memory, so may not be spot on.
Data is a combination of symbols (at least one).
The 2GB is the amount of symbols being transferred from (or to) your phone.
The GB version is more specific than the general term “data”. In this case, it specifically refers to 2 billion bytes (each byte being 8 bits, a “bit” being a 1 or a 0). But in the general sense, “data” can be a synonym for “information” which has many definitions, some of which are pure physics concepts.
I learned “information” to be “data” + “context”
Simplified: “3” is data “3 Upvotes” is Information
In general - an entry of information.
E.g from surveys and studies you get
- Numerical data/quantitative data, which counts or measures things and then makes graphs and charts.
- Qualitative data - opinions and testimonies regarding products, which can be used e.g in a board meeting, to understand how a consumer interacts with a product and needs. It can also be used just on promotional material, e.g when a book has a Stephen King quote saying “yeah it’s pretty good or whatever”
But your type, “mobile (phone) data” is computational data. Accessing the internet through WiFi requires computation, aka work done by computers.
The 2GB of data is a limit of how much remote WiFi you can receive on the device without incurring additional charges.
The etymology is that a “datum” (the plural of which is data) is something that is “given”.
So data is information that has been given.
In computers, data (information) is stored in bits (zeroes and ones). Eight bits are a byte, a billion bytes are a gigabyte, so the plan you describe allows you to download (or transmit overall?) 2*8*1000000000 = 16000000000 ones or zeroes that are used to encode data for computers (which they will decode into text, images, videos, whatever).
