Data leeches

lol... what was that adage? if you passively suggest something, be prepared to do it.

Honestly, I'm late to this (due to a heat pump blower motor issue... long story), but I'd have to say that the biggest drains are (not in any particular order):

1. Satellite television boxes and gaming consoles - I can generally just term this IoT anymore, because more and more we're seeing lots of devices (even toilets) have some dumb reason for being connected (and susceptible, but that's whole 'nother story) the internet and they're increasingly unrelenting on the data they use. Satellite television seems particularly a problem, because remote DVR setting tends to prioritize On-Demand instead of live programming and you can mistakenly record a 5GB movie. There are other services such as software updates will prioritize internet over the one-way satellite feeds. This will also include on-screen guides and apps that use a tremendous amount of data, and are perfectly happy using it without you knowing about it. All of my DirecTV boxes are off-line and are staying that way unless I want to order/watch a PPV, then I might temporarly hook them up. BTW: Have you seen the size of on-demand nexgen games now?

2. Video streaming protocols - not just because of the inherent volume that a 1-hour show or 90-minute movie would require, but depending on protocol and server response window, the high lag can contribute to unwarranted resends that unnecessarily add to buffer time and data drain. To a lesser extent you can add security cameras to this because it's basically the same thing, but you have to send the video somewhere, then recieve it somewhere else. If you're using it to watch what's going on and they're both using the same modem, it's a double-whammy.

3. Any kind of real-time cloud work - for reasons similar to streaming, things like Google Docs are especially notorious for eating data. Whenever my wife says she has to update her lesson plans and grading (all done on-line) the hairs on the back of my neck go up.

4. Social media apps - Particularly Facebook and Instagram because there's no way to hide people's images and videos. Media, especially hi-res media, are a massive data sink depending upon what resolution they are converted to. We also had a discussion about compression/decompression of media built into Gen5, and I had a test procedure all ready to go to try to characterize it. But I never really pursued it. I'm mainly a Twitter guy (and not a lot of even that anymore), where you can hide all media from showing by default. That greatly reduces data consumption.

I'm sure there's a lot more. This is just off the top of my head.