How much data league uses!

I work out of town, on the side of the road waiting for an emergency to happen. It's pretty boring as there isn't often an emergency. This is where the magic happens - I play League of Legends at work, all day. Because I'm in the middle of nowhere I have to use my cell phone tethered to my laptop for internet.

My typical work day is 7am to 7pm. In that time I typically see anywhere from 7 games up to 14 games. In order to play I have to have my phone connected via USB cable. Wifi hotspotting is too unreliable. With tethering I have to have at least 2 bars of LTE internet in order to get a good enough ping to play. I can play with less but my ping will jump past 150ms and make it extremely difficult. Definitely not a wise choice, so I choose not to.

Now over the past year that I have been doing this I've been steadily monitoring how much data I use as when you're using your cell phone for data you tend to spend a lot more money for much less data allowance. I started by only playing every once in a while, a couple games a day. At that point I noticed about 100MB of data in an average 35 Minute game. Lately Ive noticed game typically run anywhere from 75MB to 120MB depending on their length.

The problem with this is not just the game but your computer running background process. Mid game I've had drop box (which is disabled on startup) attempt to download updates, windows updates, java update, etc. I don't enable updates ever so I'm not sure why they're doing this but they are! I've attempted to restrict internet access to everything except league but that seems to cause more issues than it solves.

TLDR: League uses on average 75 - 120 MB of data per game depending on the game length. Ping and data usage will increase due to background process. Use Task Manager to close these off to preserve your ping and data. This really isn't that much if you're not playing for 8+ hours a day.