( CNN ) -- Editor 's note : Amy Gahran writes about mobile tech for CNN.com . She is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and media consultant whose blog , contentious.com , explores how people communicate in the online age . As AT & T and other wireless providers move away from offering unlimited data plans , many smartphone owners want to better understand their own wireless data usage to avoid racking up surprise charges . While you can log on to your wireless carrier account to check how much data you 've used so far during the current billing period , you often ca n't tell how much data each type of mobile activity consumes . Recently in Fierce Broadband Wireless , Cintia Garza of Maravedis ( a wireless market research and analysis firm ) offered a table of smartphone data usage by mobile activity . She estimates that if you generally send or receive 20 e-mails on your smartphone daily ( no attachments ) , that 's probably about 0.01 GB of data usage over the course of one month . Bumping that up to about 70 no-attachment e-mails sent or received daily uses about 0.04 GB per month . Viewing an average of 20 web pages on your smartphone per a day would consume about 0.11 GB in a month , according to Garza . Watching 20 minutes of mobile video per day uses about 1.14 GB per month . An hour of streaming mobile music per day uses about 0.86 GB per month . Garza 's benchmarks can help you plan a mobile `` diet '' that wo n't bust your budget . She based these estimates on data from AT & T smartphone users , and not all smartphones and carrier networks are created equally . But it helps to know which mobile activities generally are more data-heavy , so you know what to cut back on to keep your wireless bill under control . What 's a `` normal '' level of mobile data usage ? According to Garza , an average residential ( non-business ) smartphone user consumes about this much data per day : . • Fewer than 10 e-mails sent/received ( no attachments ) = 2.5 MB . • 1 e-mail with photo attachment = 10 MB . • 3 e-mails sent/received ( with other attachment ) = 12 MB . • 5 minutes of streaming music per day ( about 2.5 hours per month ) = 72 MB . • 5 web pages visited = 25 MB . • 0-1 applications downloaded ( games/songs ) = 60 MB . • 10 social media posts per day = 14 MB . • 1 minute of streaming video per day ( about 30 minutes per month ) = 60 MB . Over the course of a month , that adds up to 255.5 MB ( about a quarter of a gigabyte ) on average -- but that 's just for mobile content . Mobile access to data also entails considerable overhead , and consumers pay for that , too . The smallest of AT & T 's new data plans gives mobile users 200 MB of data per month for $ 15 . The `` DataPro '' plan gives people 2 gigabytes of data -- about 10 times more -- for $ 25 per month . `` Signaling traffic '' is how smartphones keep in touch with wireless data networks and move between cells . Garza explains that the growing problem of wireless network congestion comes mostly from smartphones constantly querying the network as they move among cell sites . This means that you 're racking up some data usage anytime your smartphone is on . According to Garza , `` While data traffic is also growing , signaling traffic is outpacing actual mobile data traffic by 30 percent to 50 percent , if not more . '' There 's not much that consumers can do to control the amount of signaling traffic from their smartphones -- aside from simply turning your phone off or operating it in `` airplane mode '' when you do n't need online access or incoming calls . However , mobile content usage is something that you can control .
One expert 's benchmarks can help you plan a mobile `` diet '' that wo n't bust your budget . Garza : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx8q4tXfZpM Consumers ca n't do much to control the amount of signaling traffic from their smartphones .