Unknown data usage early morning

I agree, I don't understand the "roll-up" explanation. If the roll-up was a duplicate of all the webpages, email, texts, etc that you ran through for the day, that might explain the size of the transfers, but that kind of recording of activity is well into the privacy invasion territory.
If roll-up is more like a web log, or bytes transferred count then the size should be very small, a few 100K at most.

Last night, I turned off the 3G after finishing everything for the day. Turned phone on in am, cleared usage stats, turned on 3G, left it in the charger.

At noon, I checked it again. 28 kbs sent. Nothing being done. Fetch is still manual. Only change was turning the 3G back on.

If 3G is on, the phone seems to find the micro cell before it finds my WiFi, so there's a tiny exchange (1-3 kb).

I think this may be as low as I can get these phantom "where am I?" transfers.

I had tried several pages one by one. The lone culprit was Macrumors.com. I feel for all of you with this problem because the source is obviously different than mine. Nevertheless, it is disconcerting and I was ready to smash my beloved iPhone out of frustration. Luckily for me, I have been able to figure it out and my overages this month will only be a few dollars.

this is the sound recorded during the day being uploaded to apple/whoever

if you are in a lot of noise and conversations and stuff all day, upload will be large

if in quiet, very small upload

no ****

Message was edited by: quips

@MightyMac - Thanks for the idea but like others I have never visited that website and typically the ones I frequent are usually formatted for iPhones so there is little auto-refreshing to worry about.

It truly seems like each case is somewhat different but also it is concerning at how diffuse the problem is. I have heard many people say that if the iPhone is in sleep mode that any Push/timed Fetch activity goes across the Edge/3G network instead of the WiFi that may be available. Is that true? Can't an iPod Touch receive Push/timed Fetch and it does not even have an Edge/3G radio? Is it just that Edge/3G is the default and WiFi secondary? (I am still on an original iPhone so only have Edge myself).

Like many others I have played around with settings on my iPhone and this is what I have seen. Before going to sleep I shut off all Notifications and also shut off Push and timed Fetch for my only email account (MobileMe) on the evening of 6/8/10 and only turned it back on during the entire day on 6/10/10 and then back off before bed on 6/10/10. I did not shut off my phone. I know I used my phone on Edge during the day on 6/10/10 on several occasions. Otherwise I will admit I did not use my phone outside of WiFi use, but that is typical for me.

Here are the current results:

06/11 04:48 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1KB
06/10 05:31 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 957KB
06/09 04:48 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 78KB
*06/08 02:00 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 2598KB*
06/07 08:00 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 227KB
06/07 10:58 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 729KB
*06/07 02:12 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1226KB*
06/06 01:12 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 2641KB
*06/06 02:19 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 473KB*
06/05 04:19 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 4201KB
*06/05 02:23 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1500KB*
*06/04 02:23 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1492KB*

I had large data charges at 2-3am on 6/4 through 6/8 but then none since changing the settings overnight. Now the daytime charges on 6/5/10 and 6/6/10 are definitely days I accessed EDGE while using my phone so those larger chunks make sense, but not the other middle of the night ones. If this is just accounting why would the chunks of data drop off as soon as I disable Push/Fetch/Notification in the evening only. And where are the entries for when I accessed data on 6/10/10 during the day? It just doesn't make sense. If AT&T is going to start offering Capped Plans then they better get their bookkeeping sorted out since all of us are now going to scrutinize every charge compared to not even glancing at it when we were all on unlimited plans!

Since my initial posting on 6/9/10, this is my TOTAL usage since killing all Fetch/Push, and all Auto-Syncing of apps:

06/11 02:42 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 76KB
06/10 03:42 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 598KB
06/10 02:49 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1KB
06/09 02:49 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 868KB

I should note that I also have been refraining from using my phone to move any data unless I know I am connected to Wifi. Today I reset my Usage Data, and I will move data at specific times on Edge intentionally to see if they show up when they happen in my stats. And then we'll see if my mystery usage spikes for this so-called 'catch-up' transfers.

I'm in the UK and I've noticed a similar problem with O2. They recently announced they're changing the tariffs and data will no longer be unlimited so out of interest I've checked my usage today. I seem to 2 entries per day - a large number at midnight every day and then a smaller number in the evening. If it was just loading the days data I would expect the evening number to be larger than the midnight one? It all seems very strange!

This is an example of what it shows:

05 May 10 00:00:00 idata.o2.co.uk 5049 0.000
05 May 10 23:07:24 idata.o2.co.uk 2 0.000
06 May 10 00:00:00 idata.o2.co.uk 18099 0.000
06 May 10 23:12:26 idata.o2.co.uk 6 0.000
07 May 10 00:00:00 idata.o2.co.uk 17141 0.000
07 May 10 21:00:29 idata.o2.co.uk 19 0.000
08 May 10 00:00:00 idata.o2.co.uk 3260 0.000
08 May 10 20:09:03 idata.o2.co.uk 21 0.000
09 May 10 00:00:00 idata.o2.co.uk 183 0.000
09 May 10 20:41:34 idata.o2.co.uk 13 0.000
10 May 10 00:00:00 idata.o2.co.uk 11608 0.000
11 May 10 00:00:00 idata.o2.co.uk 12207 0.000
11 May 10 23:11:49 idata.o2.co.uk 822 0.000
12 May 10 00:00:00 idata.o2.co.uk 6222 0.000

Everyone keeps talking about push/fetch, or other things causing the transfers, but it still doesn't solve the problem of why the phone is using 3G. I always stay connected to my wifi and I still get the 2am transfers. Seems like something is overriding the wifi and using wireless data. This makes no sense!

Last night, I managed to get data usage down to 1 kb (and that might have been the "Hello, I'm here, are you here?" exchange first thing in the morning when I checked it.

Phone settings
Airplane Mode OFF
WiFi ON
Data Roaming OFF
Call Forwarding ON (and I got a forwarded call during the day)
3G ON
Location Services OFF
Fetch/Push OFF
reset at 9:00 AM

Most importantly, for the first time in this research project, I closed all Safari windows.

I didn't use the phone at all yesterday, just left it in the charger.

Haven't checked AT&T yet, but their night time usage doesn't typically show up until noon. It will be interesting to see when that 1kb each direction occurred.

Very interesting developments.

I turned off push (which I only use for Find My Iphone - everything is set to manual) on 6/8. For 4 days I had little or no stuff during the night. And that is unheard of since I had stuff almost every day in the middle of the night. Yesterday, 6/12, I turned push back on but reset the phone before I went to bed. In the morning the phone showed 17K total transfer, big deal. But I just logged onto AT&T and they say 2589 KBytes at 2:28 AM.

It is not AT&T and it is not MobileME. User of other carriers and user without MobilMe are reporting the same problem.

It seems to me the size of the file varies too much to be simple diagnostics.

I'm in the UK and also with O2. I would like to check my usage. Can you tell me where you found all the information in your post. I've checked under General - usage. That just gives the amount of data sent or received but doesn't break it down.

We're talking about att.com. View Usage Details. Click data. Click data again.

View Past Usage Data and you will see a bar graph showing per month usage. Click Bill History on the left to get to those months. Pick a month. Usage Details. Data.

"If you are connected to a WiFi network during the day (as I am for most of the day) you will have no data usage that AT&T sees.

I don't really leave my home for very long and use WIFI at home all the time and have the same large transfers going on btw 1-2 am (Central time) when I'm asleep. So I don't understand how I can have all this large sent transfers going on when 1, I'm asleep and 2, I'm on WIFI.