Unknown data usage early morning

To address a couple of your mysteries, the reason AT&T doesn't list every transfer is because they DID when the phone was first released. People got 300 page bills. And there were huge protests over it.

The reason you see a large transfer at midnight (or 1, 2 or 3AM based on time zone) and also smaller transfers during the day is because of the way usage gets reported. Usage is collected by MTSOs (which control a group of towers), and they forward a single number for each phone to the billing system. As you leave the area covered by one the usage accumulated by that one is sent to the billing system. So if you travel around using data there will be one record for each MTSO's area you leave (the system knows when you leave an area because your phone registers in another area). The large transfer at midnight is the cumulative usage for the last area you were in. Rather than keep the record open until you leave that area it closes the record at midnight. By this process you should not see data from more than 24 hours earlier, unless there is a glitch in the system or if the usage was in a partner's area of coverage rather than the AT&T network and they delayed reporting it.

The ONLY way to know the actual time data transfers took place is to use an app like DataMan.

Is the Google traffic the exploit that Google planted for iPhones?

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/google-exploits-safari-bug-to-plant-cookies-sa ys-its-known-functionality-20120217/

Since you have WireShark you may want to register and download the FREE trial of Cascade Pilot that compliments WireShark bigtime.

The full-featured, 30-day Cascade Pilot evaluation, please go tohttp://www.riverbed.com/us/contact/cascade-pilot-30-day-trial.php. Cascade Pilot feature-specific videos are also available athttp://www.riverbed.com/us/products/cascade/cascade_pilot.php should you prefer to begin a self-education process by viewing these short and very worthwhile canned demonstrations of this analysis tool.

That 10 minute reporting has always been in the version I downloaded a month or so ago but not for individual Apps. I ended up turning it off because it ended up being a battery hog. Will have a look at it. I'm anxious to see how "Doug from MA's" test goes using the individual wireless network plus Wireshark.

I just got the latest update yesterday. I've never had battery problems with DMP. I leave it on all the time. You could try Battery Doctor to improve your battery performance. It's either free or .99. I got it too long ago to remember which.

Now had DMP for over a month and reported some discrepancies back to them as there were some reports missing about 4-5 days then all of a sudden a great 900Mb report outta nowhere but after this latest update when you look at the Apps usage it looks like they've finally come up with a way to see what apps are using how much data. One line with what seems to be Cellular and one with Wi-Fi. Looks MUCH better so far but it'll be interesting to see how it stacks up against the next AT&T bill. When we're paying about $200 a month for two iPhones and getting over-charged for data usage we're still questioning, it's getting ridiculous. Lol.

Email accounts can use a lot of data, especially IMAP, iCloud and Exchange. Exchange in particular uses Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol, which has huge overhead. But all of these need to keep your local mailboxes in sync with the server, and if you have a large number of messages in your mailboxes (I currently have 800 in my Exchange inbox) that sync can use a lot of data. On top of that most IMAP and Exchange servers are "modern" and fully support HTML, which is also has very high overhead. A text message of 1K, for example, can grow to 10K if sent as HTML, and up to several MB if it has attachments and/or graphics in it.

Exchange also syncs calendars and contacts, so any time you update a contact or calendar item those need to be resynced.

And in addition to the normal data, if the connection is interrupted it has to send everything all over again.

Yes, loving this feature. According to DMP, the largest amount of 3G data transfer is iCloud. And I have the option to transfer over cellular turned off for Documents & Data, so I have no clue why it's still transferring data.

Alright, so this was super frustrating to me - as I just signed up with AT&T and had t-mobile on edge data before. I have a factory unlocked 4Gs. I reset my stats on May 1st. In a year, somehow I only transferred 484 mb or something on TMobile, and in 11 days on AT&T, I'd SENT 3.9GB. Absurd.

What I've seemed to have found is that the culprit was somehow iCloud. I was out of space, and there was an additional 500mb required to back up - and it seemed to be continually sending stuff - it hasn't completely gone away according to my bill - but as of right now, it's only sent 5mb since 11am today.

What I did was, due to my iCloud space being insufficient, I upgraded my space to 10GB, backed everything up using wifi, turned all the doc and data stuff off that was listed earlier in this thread and once everything was backed up, left iCloud to it's own devices - on Friday, prior to doing this, in 11 min (between 629-640) my SENT data went from 3.6-3.9GB. After doing this, my data stayed at 3.9 all weekend, and I just reset it today. Seems like Apple has some iCloud issues....

Hope this helps.

MichaelBlight wrote:

Just to add my own 2 cents - I have been using DataMan Pro for a while now and there is always 3G and Wifi activity every night even though the phone is always connected to Wifi. It almost always seems to be caused by "iCloud Service" or "Mail" and was much higher when I was sync-ing more with iCloud and had Mail Push enabled.

How do you know it's always connect to WiFi? Do you know that WiFi is turned off when the phone is asleep (that is, the screen is dark), unless the phone is connected to power?

asfdj wrote:

I have identified my issue. I don't have a resolution yet, but I'm very confident that I've isolated the cause of the massive discrepancy between what my iPhone reports for Cellular Data Usage and what AT&T reports.

Adding fuel to the Microcell fire. I ran an experiment - 4 days with Microcell on and 4 days with the Microcell off. Here are the results:

MICROCELL ON (MAY 8-12)

iPhone

Cellular

Data

Usage AT&T % Difference

_______ _______ -------------------

iPhone 4S 87.5MB 453.1MB 417%

iPhone 4 59.8MB 100.6MB 68%

iPhone 4 7.9MB 5.7MB (27.3)% *my son's phone, not at home

iPhone 4S 51.9MB 141.5MB 172%

iPhone 3G 12.9MB 50.7B 292%

MICROCELL OFF (MAY 12-16)

iPhone

Cellular

Data

Usage AT&T % Difference

_______ _______ -------------------

iPhone 4S 152.8MB 136.2MB (10.8)%

iPhone 4 48MB 44.0MB (8)%

iPhone 4 23.6MB 24.5MB 3.8% *my son's phone, not at home

iPhone 4S 46.9MB 52.1MB 11.1%

iPhone 3G 21.8MB 23.1MB 6.0%

As you can see the delta between the iPhone and AT&T is minimal, likely due to variabilitiy in when usage data is uploaded to AT&T. Also note the usage for 4 days is quite consistent for 4 days, so not a variation in usage patterns.

So does this make you as mad as much as it does me? To have AT&T continually deny there is an issue, and force customers to upgrade to higher and higher data plans is beyond unacceptable, it is bordering on justification for a class action lawsuit. If it weren't for all the people in this thread willing to take the time to perform such tests and publish results this would go on in perpetuity.

AT&T - ARE YOU LISTENING???? FIX THIS OR GIVE CREDITS TO ALL CUSTOMERS WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED EXPONENTIAL DATA USAGE GROWTH SINCE 5.1 and iPhone 4S. $1,000 would be acceptable given the pain and burden you have created for your loyal customers.

If any of you have the patience to speak with AT&T, please direct them to this thread and ask them to respond here. We'd all love to hear from them.

@jbeir Your 4S numbers are like mine. It took 6 weeks of dismissive, highly scripted and erroneous responses before I finally reached someone at AT&T who understood what I was saying and opened a second case. Shortly afterwards, I received word that there was a provisioning problem found and that it should be fixed.

It isn't.

I reported back with new screenshots, and since then, it's been a wall of silence.

I've now unplugged the M-Cell permanently. Dropped calls are now the norm around here, but at least I'm seeing accurate data numbers.

If you can't accurately, within a reasonable range, measure a customer's data usage, then you shouldn't be making decisions (throttling, capping, billing) based on those numbers. It's that simple. I wouldn't stand for it from the electric or water company, I don't see why data is any different. If you're going to bill based on numbers you're collecting, they'd better be right or you're essentially committing fraud.

At some point, I may reconnect the M-Cell and try some packet capture on its ethernet port to see what's flowing and where it's going. But investing hours of my time to troubleshoot an AT&T problem doesn't seem reasonable. What a frustrating experience.

Everyone, check out David Pogue's story on "How to Track your Smartphone Usage"

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/how-to-track-your-smartphone-data-usag e/?ref=personaltechemail&nl=technology&emc=edit_ct_20120517

Post to the discussion there to encourage David to dig into this issue.

I have the high usage problem withouth the Microcell. For me it seems to have begun on or around March 20. I have been monitoring with DataMan Pro and pestering AT&T until they finally created what's called an ICU case (took several hours on the phone with them to get there.) I exported my DataMan logs, which BTW agree with the iOS native data meter, yet reflect about 10% of the usage AT&T is charging me for. I emailed the logs to the AT&T rep and he compared them with the usage logs (stamped with my IMEI number). Shocking fact: iOS reported usage and AT&T tech-support usage roughly agree! So there is a discrepancy between AT&T usage logs and AT&T billing records. I will update with more details soon.

Go back somewhere around page 83 or 84 of this thread and look for my entry that outlined a discussion with an Apple Customer Service supervisor name Rasheed and an AT&T Product Satisfaction rep named James. After an hour and a half conversation, James suspected something amiss with the billing procedures being used since the 200mb plans went into effect. Evidently they (AT&T) didn't really look into it deep enough, if at all!!

Looking forward to the update. I'm still thrashing through data at the rate of about 200MB per day according to AT&T, yet the iPhone reports less than 70MB sent+received in 14 days. AT&T are "working on it" - but then, they've been saying that for 6 weeks now. It's unbelievable to me that they're basing decisions on what to charge, or who to throttle, on numbers that are - in some cases - simply wrong.

What's more alarming is that there doesn't seem to be anyone at AT&T that has a firm grasp on how to go about troubleshooting it.