Originally Posted by Step666:
“If your YouTube video completely buffers in half the time, it doesn't change the length of the video/how long it takes you to watch it.
If you have double the speed, the song you're streaming on Spotify will still take use the same amount of data and take the same amount of time to listen to.
It doesn't matter how fast your connection is, Facebook will still load the same new posts, photos etc.”
Except of course faster speeds (and higher resolution screens) may mean:
1 - YouTube videos in higher resolution / better quality.
2 - Spotify using higer bitrates.
3 - Facebook loading higher resolution images / videos (which remember by default autoplay).
All of which do use more data.
And of course, faster speeds also mean people will be more likely to do things over the mobile network that previously they couldn't (or didn't want to do cos the network wasn't reliable enough) like streaming iPlayer videos (which I know is possible over even 3G, but at least in my experience isn't that reliable, so atm I usually download the stuff I want to watch over my home WiFi).
So yeah, the extra speed itself doesn't use more data, but faster speeds make it a lot more likely the more data will be used.