Data Usage & Billing Calculations

Calculating Data Usage

When a cellular-enabled device sends or receives data over a cellular network, data is transferred using packets, similar to protocols such as TCP or HTTP. These packets include headers that contain source, destination, and other information necessary to route the data through the cellular network.

When communicating via Soracom, each packet uses Ethernet, IP, UDP, and GTP headers as it travels through a cellular network. This creates a total header size of 50 to 54 bytes. These additional bytes are included in a SIM's data usage.

Soracom converts units using 1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte, 1,024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte, etc.

Both uplink packets and downlink packets include Ethernet, IP, UDP, and GTP headers, which are counted toward the SIM's data usage and are subject to data usage charges, as shown below:

Calculating Billable Data Usage

Billable data usage is calculated based on the minimum billing unit of the country where the data was used. Raw data usage is rounded up to the nearest increment of the minimum billing unit. This rounding is applied to each SIM card individually, not to total usage across all SIM cards on your account.

For example, the minimum billing unit for the United States for IoT SIM cards is 100 kilobytes. If over the course of the month one IoT SIM card uses 127 kilobytes of data, it will be billed for 200 kilobytes.

Minimum billing units for each country can be found on the Supported Carriers page.

Calculating Data Charges

After determining billable data usage, Soracom calculates data charges based on the SIM card's plan (Pay-As-You-Go or bundled) and the country where the data was used.

Overage prices for bundled data plans can be found in the Pricing and Fee Schedule.

Data prices for each country for Pay-As-You-Go plans can be found on the Supported Carriers page.