I want to begin experimenting with bitcoin. I notice the estimated upload traffic for the real bitcoin network is around 200 GB per month. That's too much for an experiment. How much traffic per month could I expect for a node on the test network?
I havent seen a proper answer on the internet so I did the test myself using bitcoin-0.18.1 with the -testnet flag and after downloading the chain ~2 GB I monitored the traffic of the bitcoind process with nethogs for 24 hours.
I got 40MB download and 20MB uploads so 60*30 = 1800MB
You can expect 1.8GB of traffic from the bitcoin testnet compared to the 200GB+ they advise for the bitcoin mainnet