Unknown data usage early morning

I think we need to focus on one single issue: billing accuracy. Forget about "how" or "what" is using data. We need to ask this: is ATT over billing or is the usage numbers in OS 4 wrong?

Because sinceva reset on July 21 my phone reports 6.5MB sent and 22.5 MB received on cellular (which is in line with my historical usage) but ATT is claiming over 70 MB used in same period.

One of these two things is wrong. And this discrepancy has NOTHING to do with what is running in background, wifi on sleep etc. These are OS usage reports and ther are now off by a factor of 3.

Well, personally I see "billing accuracy" and "large amounts of unknown data being transferred" as the same issue.

And Rick, I used TomTom with 3G only while I was on the road. You can't use it on WiFi for navigation. How would that be possible? You aren't navigating when you're sitting at a hotel with Wifi! Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question.

It doesn't use that much data. Well under a meg a day and I was driving hundreds of KMs and 4-5 hours most days.

I am positive that TomTom was not behind the sudden excessive usage on my phone.

I do actually think that I updated to OS 4 right around then (don't remember exactly when and it was via my laptop) so it could very well be an OS 4 issue and that would certainly make sense for my personal situation.

BulaRae wrote:
And Rick, I used TomTom with 3G only while I was on the road. You can't use it on WiFi for navigation. How would that be possible? You aren't navigating when you're sitting at a hotel with Wifi! Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question.

It doesn't use that much data. Well under a meg a day and I was driving hundreds of KMs and 4-5 hours most days.

I was hoping with the sim removed, the GPS (and thus location services) would still work. I realize any navigation on wifi wouldn't work or at least be less reliable. Doesn't the iphone use a combination of cell towers, GPS satellites and wifi locations to pinpoint one's location? Without a sim card (and no access to cell towers) the other 2 should still work, right? I was also hoping that Tom Tom would have all of the maps already installed on the phone and not require cellular data. Why would Tom Tom need cellular data?

brm123 wrote:
You should post "your" question. My single issue is the transfer of large amonts of unidentified data from an unknown sorce to an unknown source. That is the single issue.

Hmm, if you read earlier in the thread I have already posted my question and have reported my interaction with ATT and Apple. My current conclusion is that I DO NOT believe the large transfers are real. I have opted out of iAds, I have turned off feedback to Apple, I do not run "background apps" that use data, and have only push notification for mobile me mail account. So there is NO WAY my phone is transferring 6-36 MB of data when I am not using it (yes the last one was a whopping 36 MB transfer).

I am starting to doubt ATT billing, but unless enough people check their usage against reports I am not sure anything will happen. Apple reps were very nice and helpful but eventually get to the point that their hands are tied.

chbphoto

Right click on your phone in iTunes and select Reset Warnings (if you have a 1 button mouse then press Control and click). Then disconnect your phone, wait a few seconds and reconnect your phone. A dialog box should popup asking if you want to send data to Apple. Choose Disagree.

I have been following this thread for some time now and I wish I only had 10 to 40MB downloads. I have been experiencing unexplained downloads in the middle of the night of as much as 180000KB. I got my first e-mail from AT&T when I reached 65% of my 2GB plan only 10 days into the billing cycle.

I called AT&T and they went through the list of: turn off all push notifications and kill all apps that are suspended. The unexplained data usage was reduced but was still happening.

When I got the e-mail that I had exceeded 90% of my data plan with over a week left in the billing cycle, I called AT&T again to try and find out what was going on. The first CSR tried to sound sympathetic and listened patiently for a while but was still giving the standard response of "it must be an app, or the phone is doing updates, etc." I kept insisting that I was very careful about making sure there were no apps suspended in the background and that I do not do anything that could account for that amount of data usage. I also explained that I had been logging all of my data usage and tracking the change in the data usage reported on the iPhone and comparing it to the usage that was being reported on the AT&T web site. The web site was reporting up to six times as much data usage as what the iPhone was reporting. She put me on hold to "do some research" and, after about 15 minutes on hold, the line went dead. I've heard about "AT&T dropping calls" but this is ridiculous. I was calling from a land line.

I called right back and when the new CSR started giving me the same menu driven responses about background apps and updates and blah, blah, blah, I insisted on talking to a supervisor. The supervisor took down some information and promised to do some research and call me back within 3 hours. That was yesterday and of course I have not gotten a call back.

At this time I have the Cellular Data setting turned off to try to avoid exceeding my data plan and incurring the extra data charge that the e-mail confirmed would happened if I went over my 2GB data limit. The exact quote from the e-mail was "Our systems have detected that you are nearing your data plan limit. Your base plan has a monthly allowance of 2GB. Any data usage which exceeds your plan allowance will be billed at $10 per each additional 1GB."

Apparently, no data transfer has occurred since 8:21am yesterday when I turned off cellular data. Today is the last day of my billing cycle. I will reset my usage tonight and turn my Cellular data back on tomorrow and continue logging my use and comparing the iPhone data usage report against the AT&T web site.

After much of my own troubleshooting during this ordeal, I have come up with a few possibilities. The trouble could be any combination of these plus others.

1. I had an Exchange email account setup. Is it possible that the Exchange accounts maintain an open connection to the Exchange server and carry on constant chatter with the server? I know that an exchange account in MS Outlook on a PC results in constant data transfers. The huge data amount recorded in the middle of the night could just be the AT&T server summing up what had been used by that open connection over the past 24 hours.

2. Did anyone have any audio streaming apps on their phone besides the well known internet radio apps like Last.fm and Pandora? I had an app called 5-0 Radio Police Scanner installed for a while and believe that it may have been streaming audio in the background even though I was not actually listening to it.

3. My usage logging and monitoring leads me to believe that AT&T is grossly over reporting the amount of data that is being used. It may not be intentional. All I know is that they report a lot more usage than the iPhone does. Is it possible that the iPhone does not record certain types of data transfer for some reason?

Just my two cents worth.

Hey Mark:

In response to your numbers 1 and 2, I'm the one who had over 400 mb unexplained usage while roaming internationally. I have two email accounts set on my phone on manual and I only used them to send an email when I couldn't get to a computer while I was roaming. They are not MobileMe nor Exchange accounts.

And I've never used a streaming app for music nor downloaded from iTunes using my phone.

Although my overages were not as extreme, I didn't have any music streaming apps or exchange mail set up. After hitting 90% of my plan after two weeks with almost no data usage on my part (not to mention, as others, almost always being in wifi), I abandoned my phone and got the cheapest blackberry I could find until this is resolved. As soon as the blackberry was activated, my usage dropped to next to nothing - which is exactly how I've been using the phone.
One other note: I have mysterious night charges as well as many during the day. I went back and looked at all the times day usage was reported. At first I didn't think anything of it - they matched my commuting times, the rare time I'm not in range of wifi. But I realized that I was having massive data use reported literally the minute I stepped out of range of wifi! There are many instances when I did not use the phone AT ALL on my commute, but the minute I leave my office or house, large data use is reported. ***?? Then the overnight use is on top of this. 35% of my plan was used up after I had agreed to not use data except in wifi scenarios.
SO: this is not app related! This is not specifically an iphone issue, so it's not apple related!
This leads me to simply one conclusion: ATT is grossly over-reporting. Now what do we do?

I think we should stop with "which app" is causing this and stop role-playing helpdesk here. Members on this chain has already proven that a refresh OS recover will do this. I personally have version 3.2 and 4.0 on iphone 3G and are seeing this issue. So, I think its safe to say:

its not iphone 4, 3G, nor 3GS.
its not OS 3.x,
its not OS 4.x,

Its not third party apps (not saying that 3rd party apps won't do this but a consistent 2AM-3AM uploads via celluar network) People have posted fresh recovery with default apps and is still doing this. So I kindly ask that ppl stop patronizing posters with a bias of "it must be the apps you install", please, you start to sound like AT&T support.

I've personally did the "don't allow" stats upload to Apple in iTune by doing reset warnings on both phones... The 2AM data upload disappeared for about 4 days and it just came back last night, ~2AM, 6mb upload.

I think its safe to say that no one really knows what's going on and its a responsibility of both Apple and AT&T to address this, they are in a partnership after all. If Apple pushes this off to AT&T, then they might as well give us the freedom to take the iphone else where.

I wonder if ppl who unlock their phones and signed up with Tmobile have this issue? hmmmm...

Message was edited by: adala

rentamark wrote:
I have been following this thread for some time now and I wish I only had 10 to 40MB downloads. I have been experiencing unexplained downloads in the middle of the night of as much as 180000KB. I got my first e-mail from AT&T when I reached 65% of my 2GB plan only 10 days into the billing cycle.

3. My usage logging and monitoring leads me to believe that AT&T is grossly over reporting the amount of data that is being used. It may not be intentional. All I know is that they report a lot more usage than the iPhone does. Is it possible that the iPhone does not record certain types of data transfer for some reason?

This is where I think we all need to focus. The whole issue of background data, apps running, etc, is irrelevant. I'll repeat from before: at least for me the iPhone usage state and ATT's DO NOT MATCH AT ALL. This is not in any way related to the "app in use" as all data must got through the OS and be logged.

I am leaning more and more towards data usage reporting errors on part of ATT. I do not believe it is intentional, but obviously it will be very difficult to get them to investigate.

so this is what i have done with both our i4. when i called apple last week, after other drama i talked to a tech that said i needed to restore the phone and set it as a new phone. it's been about a week since and i have not had ANY nightly down/up loads. just my usage during the day. i asked her if this is just a thing to try or is this the fix to this exact issue and she said this is the fix the this problem. not sure if she's just reading a script or what but so far it's working for me.

Edmund Pirali wrote:
This is where I think we all need to focus. The whole issue of background data, apps running, etc, is irrelevant. I'll repeat from before: at least for me the iPhone usage state and ATT's DO NOT MATCH AT ALL. This is not in any way related to the "app in use" as all data must got through the OS and be logged.

Either the phone is not reporting all data transfers or AT&T has recording problems.

There will be a small discrepancy that is understandable; AT&T's smallest unit of data recording is 1 KB. The iPhone accumulates bytes. So a 500 byte transfer will be recorded by AT&T as 1,000 bytes. But generally transfers are larger than this. On a more likely scenario, a 5.1 KB transfer will be recorded as 6 KB, a 100.1 KB transfer as 101 KB. So AT&T's billable data usage will be slightly higher than what the phone records. But it should not be a huge difference. When I last traveled in the UK with my US phone I added the 100 MB roaming data plan. At the end of the trip my phone showed 66 MB, my AT&T statement showed 89 MB. Still within my 100 MB limit, but a larger discrepancy than I would have expected. In this case, however, the data were recorded by O2 and then reported to AT&T, so the discrepancy was in O2's recording, not AT&T's. Unless it is Apple's.

How could it be Apple? Well, when you send or receive data the lower levels of the protocol (data link and hardware layers) must add some routing information as part of breaking up the transmission into packets. This "packet overhead" may not be seen by iOS as it is down at the driver level. But the network sees it. Packet overhead usually isn't all that large, but 10% isn't unusual. Again, not something that could account for a large discrepancy.

I'm on day seven now of manually disabling cellular data while in areas with wi-fi, while continuing to use data as I normally would while away from wi-fi. As a result, my data usage is on track to be half of what I was billed for last month. The time stamps reported on AT&T's data usage website are precise, and there are no nighttime postings. So once again, the nighttime postings were not a daily summary, and were being billed *in addition* to my daily usage.

Interesting post on Gizmodo on this

http://gizmodo.com/5599621/those-nighttime-iphone-downloads-are-actually-not-dow nloads

And AT&T's official statement is:

This is a routine update of your daily data activity on your device to ensure the accuracy of your data billing. Customers are not charged for data usage, given that no data session is generated. It's not uncommon for devices that are ‘always on', like iPhone, to process data event records for billing purposes after a certain amount of inactivity or after long periods of time. It's also separate from how our system lets you monitor your data consumption.

Gizmodo said the same thing to me in June when I originally e-mailed them. I'm not sure I believe them. This whole thing is incredible to me. It's been months with this going on and neither AT&T or Apple have been able to properly explain it.