Usage information posted on the Dashboard comes directly from our carrier partners, all of whom are members of the GSM Association. They all use standard protocols and interfaces, and provide us with the information as reported from the gateway. This guide reviews how data metering with Hologram works.
Networking overhead
Due to networking overhead, the bandwidth used by a device will be higher than the sum of bytes your application sends and receives.
Each TCP packet (and therefore each Hologram Cloud message) incurs an overhead of about 500-700 bytes. This means that to reduce data charges, you should prefer fewer large messages over more small messages. Messages larger than about 2kB may be split into multiple packets, so this optimization is mainly relevant for very small messages.
Also, keep in mind that higher-level protocols such as HTTP have their own headers which may inflate the per-message overhead.
Inbound and outbound data
Data usage reported on the Dashboard includes data both sent to and from the device.
Network activity monitoring tools
The best way to measure your device's data usage is using a network activity monitoring tool like tshark, bmon, and tcpdump.
If your device is using odd or unexpected amounts of data this guide will help.
Manage data usage
Find more about managing data usage in your dashboard: