Unknown data usage early morning

The *real* problem here is that AT&T is not sufficiently motivated to fix an error like this one. They are handling it by trying to migrate everyone to larger data plans. I lost count of how many CSR's told me that 200 MB is not enough... I wonder how many folks would start calling in if they checked the usage on their phones every month.

We just got a new phone on the 23rd of May and for the last 5 days around midnight I am getting hit with 450000KB to 1500000KB. I have now gone over 5GB in 5 days. AT&T blames it my usage. This is crazy, it is not me. Have you gotten resolved?

That's a lot of data! Are you sure your iPhone usage counter disagrees? Settings - General - Usage - Cellular Usage

Add sent and received, and see if those numbers agree within reasonable range with the carrier totals.

I've had this problem for a long time and have had many discussions with both AT&T and Apple. Today I received a notice that my wife's phone was nearing its data limit (200mb) so I looked at our plans. She has used 186mb of her plan and there were the usual large data transfers in the middle of the night. Then I looked at my data. I had only used 98 mb with 5 days left in this cycle. I'm usually nearing my limit because of the nightly downloads. I did notice that there were some nightly downloads but they were very very small.

So why the big change? A coiuple of weeks ago, I did a system reinstall on the phone and set it up as a new phone. I did not restore from a backup and instead reinstalled the apps and retrieved my calendar and address book from iCloud. I also only installed a few apps instead of the 4+ pages I had before. The one app I did not reinstall was FACEBOOK! My wife is heavy Facebook user and it makes me wonder if Facebook is the culprit here? How many of you experiencing this problem have the Facebook app installed? I would be interested to see if anyone has the same results I got with the same procedure. WARNING Be aware that doing the restore will erase any data that some programs have saved. Discovered thisnthenhard way.

danwallie wrote:

The *real* problem here is that AT&T is not sufficiently motivated to fix an error like this one. They are handling it by trying to migrate everyone to larger data plans. I lost count of how many CSR's told me that 200 MB is not enough... I wonder how many folks would start calling in if they checked the usage on their phones every month.

I wonder if this is some kind of regional problem. I have been on ATT unlimited plan for about 2.5 years, and have only exceeded then 200MB level on two or three months. My data usage runs about the same as my wife's, who in on the 200MB plan.

I'd been having similar problems. I used my phone for a year and was always under 200 KH except once or twice when I was out of town and used it more than normal on 3G.

I didn't do a complete restore. I just did the " Reset All Settings". I didn't loose anything except custom settings. I had to redo WiFi , Bluetooth, ringtones, etc but didn't have to reinstall anything. This has fixed the problem for now.

I talked to an Apple Senior Tech who admitted Apple knows about the problem and is investigating it.

I've experienced similarly confusing data usage histories to everyone who has been posting on this thread. One thing that has been brought up again and again on here is that AT&T aggregates the billing and posts it in the early morning. This is a convenient explanation, but I don't believe it accounts for what is going on for two reasons.

First, the unexplained data usage amounts are egregiously higher than my typical usage. My plan is 200 MB/month, I text a few pictures, maybe use safari once a month, check my mail several times a day, and read a news article or two on NY Times. The pictures I text/email are the largest single data consumers, at about a megabite. A few months ago, my phone sent over 150 MB of data in "Internet/MEdia Net" data. The second reason that the standard explanation doesn't hold here is that, these usage occurances happened in the middle of the day when I wasn't using my phone. They happened around 1:30pm. I have alerts setup to tell me if I'm close to going over my data usage plan. The 65% of usage alert, then the 90% usage alert, and then the overage alert text messages all dinged in immediate succession.

After a handful of conversations with AT&T reps, I was given back the overage fee, but I was not offered any reassurance that the problem would be resolved, nor a reasonable explanation of what was going on, nor any helpful advice on how to prevent it in the future. I don't think AT&T actually knows what is going on.

Sure enough, this month, the inexplicable data usage has reared its head again. This time it follows the late night usage pattern a bit but the amount of data is still incredibly higher than any of my regular activity. I shut off 3G and Cellular Data for the remainder of my billing cycle so that I wont go over.

If any of you care to try to sort through your data usage and pinpoint what it is that AT&T is charging you for, you should (1) visit AT&T's website and peruse the "Data Detail" page to see when your data usage jumped off the charts and how many KB that was. (2) read this http://osxdaily.com/2010/07/08/read-iphone-sms-backup/ on how to open up the iPhone backup file that your phone has. (3) search that file for instances of phone usage at the date and time that AT&T shows in 1 (use http://www.epochconverter.com/to query a specific date/time).

Has anyone had the unexplained data usage issue with a Verizon iPhone? Is this only AT&T?

I have found that if I leave the phone plugged into the Apple supplied ac charger at night, I don't see the large late night data use. If I don't plug it in overnight, then I get the late night data use. Simple work-around, but I still wonder why ATT needs nearly a megabyte of data from my phone every day.

It bears repeating that among the several issues that folks are encountering, there is one which involves a combination of iOS 5.1+, iPhone 4S, and AT&T inaccurately billing data usage. In my case I discovered this was happening to me by downloading the DataMan app and turning on precision tracking for a month. It kills your battery life, but generates a detailed log in 10 minute increments of your data usage by location and app. This information led me to discover that the large usage charges I was seeing were NOT accurate. I pressed AT&T repeatedly to escalate my issue until it arrived at the ICU, where I was put in contact with a person who would actually listen to me and allowed me to email my usage logs to him. After comparing the logs with their REAL usage logs (different from the billing detail you can view on the web), he discovered that there was a discrepancy between AT&T usage logs and AT&T billing records. So it's a billing bug that seems to only appear under certain circumstances. We stumbled into a fix because they moved my account from the 200 MB data plan to the 3GB plan, which stopped the insane charges from happening. I then asked them to flip me back to 200 MB, and the charges continued to stay away. I know it's not going to solve everyone's problems but it's a point of consideration for those of you out there who are frustrated with being overcharged. Don't let them tell you that your plan is too small, or that you have to kill apps manually, or that you always have to plug in your iPhone at night, or that you need to turn off 3G all the time.

rphunte42 wrote:

I have found that if I leave the phone plugged into the Apple supplied ac charger at night, I don't see the large late night data use. If I don't plug it in overnight, then I get the late night data use.

The reason is that when the phone is plugged in WiFi stays on; when it is unplugged WiFi turns off 45 seconds after the phone goes to sleep to save the battery. So you are probably not using any less data, it's just all going over WiFi.

danwallie wrote:

It bears repeating that among the several issues that folks are encountering, there is one which involves a combination of iOS 5.1+, iPhone 4S, and AT&T inaccurately billing data usage.

You can safely leave out the iPhone 4S and iOS 5.1+ as issues. You will note that the first post in this thread was 2 years ago, on iOS 3.x and the iPhone 3G. And exactly the same issues were reported 2 years ago as they are today.

That date (June 5, 2010) is significant because it is about the time that AT&T dropped the unlimited plan. Up until that time no one bothered to check how much data they were using, because it was unlimited. So there's no way of knowing if the problem goes back before 2 years ago because there's no data available. It likely did, however.

I've been saying there is a billing problem for well over a year and that is based on a conversation held on the 3rd of March 2011. Here is my entry that was posted on that date.

I put my 2¢ worth in on this thread back on page 77 or 78. In that entry I mentioned that I had a call from Apple (call to my home phone 717-XXX-XXXX) and eventually talked to a second level Customer Service Rep. at Apple (Rasheed) about the problem. He, in turn, called a contact in AT&T's Project Management (or something very similar section) named James. After an hour or so on the phone, James and Rasheed determined that there was a serious error in AT&T's billing software that had not been caught during a recent update, I'm guessing shortly after the 200mb plans came into existence. This error was deducting "AT&T Maintenance Bandwidth" (server updates, etc.) from customers allocations. As I said at the time, these overages had probably been going on since day one but because it was then only an unlimited data plan, no one bothered to check nor cared. Once I and my wife went on to the 200mb plans is when we started paying attention, especially after she got a notice that she was sitting at 180mb of usage and that there were still upwards of two weeks before the end of our billing period.

I again had the problem again a couple months ago (it comes at 6 month intervals, almost to the day) and jumped through the same hoops - it went away again. We shall see come September!!

What day did your most recent episode start on? Mine started around March 20 and lasted for almost 3 months. It seemed to stop after "toggling" me from 200 MB to 3GB and back again (a time-saving workaround for busy folks like us?)

About the beginning of March or shortly thereafter. As I said, I am waiting for September to roll around again to see what happens. I downloaded DataMan Pro and then the update in May and it seems to be keeping an eye on things for me. Yes, a battery hog but it is doing the job. I do turn off all Network items at night and clear Apps before putting it on the charger. Currently I am sitting at right about my "good months" total of 12mb usage.

The last time I looked at plans (after going from 200MB plan to the 300MB one), the 200MB plan no longer exists. I suppose you could request it over the phone, since that's what you had before and they made you go up to a ridiculous plan you shouldn't have to pay for. But 200MB is no longer an option.

So they're aware of this problem, they're just being a greedy business. That's nice. If it weren't so expensive to cut out of a contract early, I would take my business elsewhere.