Unknown data usage early morning

One more thing - while on wifi, no data was sent or received that did not result from my using an app. I tested and that's what I found, so turning off your apps is not the answer. Also, did not turn off my apps before, so why am I having this problem now?

The line from ATT:

"And AT&T captures your data activity nightly to create a bill record in our systems. This will appear on your bill to be a late night 'charge,' but in fact, the time stamp reflects the time that your device established a connection to the network, not the time that you sent or received data."

Not sure I get that. If they only gathered data once a night, then you'd only have 1 charge by that logic. Or are they saying that for apps that are in constant communication with their server, they only get measured once?

Fishy.

Not just fishy, pure garbage. I spoke with a so called "tech" from AT&T today. She was reading from a script. I was in InfoSys for over 30 years, I know when I'm talking to someone who is technical. I have huge data usage, all send, in middle of the day - when I was not using phone, or was on wifi. They have no explanation for why this should start now when I've never gone over 130MB before. They just read the same canned baloney. This is going to take a class action lawsuit to fix. I wish someone would get it started!

funny I have iphone for over 2 years and never used much data, today i got a message

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."

why all of a sudden i am going to be using so much data when i never did before. something is fishy...

Rec'd a text from AT&T that I'd hit 65% of my 200MB usage limit. 100MB of the 130MB used was reported just this morning, on the 28th day of my billing. Who knows whether the time stamp means anything; I happened to be up in my attic using the compass app to aim a new TV antenna. The AT&T CSR tells me that sometimes when WiFi capability is fully used the iPhone also uses cell data. (Told me this comes straight from Apple; I haven't yet found that.) And oh yes, maybe the compass app uses cell data only. (After the call I turned off everything but WiFi; the app works fine. And in the attic I'm all of 15 feet from my router.)

Like so many others I'm reading about, I find charges sometimes reaching 4MB in the wee hours of the morning. I'm turning off 3G and Cellular Data on my 3GS until Apple, AT&T or whomever gets this figured out. (Doesn't seem to me like rocket science.) I'm almost always in range of WiFi, but what a pain to have to fool with settings to keep from being overcharged.

Wow... Just rec'd another text from AT&T saying that now I've used 100% of my data plan allowance and I'll be being billed another 15 bucks. So, at the beginning of today I'd used less than 30mb in 28 days. Then a usage posting of 100mb at 9:24am and now another usage posting of 69mb appears at 2:43pm and, at 11:10pm I get the text. And I've hardly used the phone.

Glad to hear there's a class action suit being filed against AT&T re: data charges. Sign me up...

HERE IN CANADA WITH ROGERS I AM NOT HAVING THE SAME PROBLEM WHEN I CLOSE THE APPS BY DCLICK NO DATA IS RUNNING BUT IF YOU LIVE THEM OPEN THEN I NOTICED SOME APPS ARE RUNNING PLUS IF YOU WANT MAKE SURE NO DATA IS RUNNING PUT THE FHONE ON AIRPLANE MODE IF THE DATA IS RUNNING THEN BRING BACK THE FHONE TO THE APPLE STORE AND ASK FOR REFUND HIS THE FHONE LOCKEED TO THE PROVIDER MAY BE HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE DATA TRANSFER? AM NOT SURE BUT I WILL INVESTIGATE I HAVE 4 I FHONE 3 ARE LOCKEED ONE IS NOT( NOW I CAN PUT IN PLACE THIS IDEA.)

iPhone Users: No Mercy For Phantom Data Usage

Hopefully the new DataMan PRO app mentioned in the post above will help folks track back data usage and in challenging their carriers "internal billing processes."

Thank you for contacting AT&T regarding a class action lawsuit against AT&T.

The lawsuit to which you refer falsely alleges that AT&T over-bills its customers for data activity. It further alleges that this data activity is occurring in the middle of the night when customers are asleep. AT&T is vigorously defending itself against these false claims and will continue to help its customers understand how data activity is processed and billed.

Customers are charged for all data sent or received. In most cases, this means the data that is needed to complete activity such as e-mailing, downloading applications, browsing the Web, downloading a video, or streaming music. However, this can also include data activity that is programmed to run in the background on your device, such as real-time updates to your applications-- like weather updates, sports scores, or your stock ticker-- which are regularly kept up to date so you have the latest information.

There is no such thing as "phantom data." The data usage on your bill reflects all the data you use during the time that your smartphone is connected to the network. The data usage on your bill reflects all the data you use during the time that your smartphone is connected to the network. AT&T captures your data activity nightly to create a bill record in our systems. This will appear on your bill to be a late night "charge," but in fact, the time stamp reflects the time that your device established a connection to the network, not the time that you sent or received data.

In response to your email, I have reviewed your last four bills for the wireless telephone number referenced in your email below, and I have determined that you were not charged for data overage charges on any of these statements. These bills are available at your online account, where you can review or print additional copies as needed.

Again, we thank you for this opportunity to assist you. Should you have additional concerns or questions about this issue, please reply to this email and address your response directly to me. If you need to contact us again regarding a new issue, please send us a new email via the contact link through your online account. As always, thank you for choosing AT&T!

Sincerely,

Jeff Patterson

AT&T

Online Customer Care Manager

I received a message about nearing my limit also. This amazes me because most of the time (all the time at night) my devices are using the wifi signal at my house. I'm going to start turning my phone off when I go to sleep. This is ridiculous.

This is very interesting perspective on another forum "How a law firm tested "phantom" AT&T smartphone data use posted by "yorthen"

# # #

Since there seems to be a bit of confusion about how the charging is performed I’d like to give a short description of charging in a 3GPP packet switched network (which to my knowledge is what AT&T uses).

As data travels between the UE (User Equipment – the phone) and the internet it will pass through several different nodes, several (or all) of these nodes will generate CDRs (Charging Data Records). These CDRs will be compared against each other to make sure that everything is OK. Normal policy for operators is that if they detect something wrong with a CDR it (and possibly earlier and later CDRs) will be discarded. This means that the operator will lose money and the user will get some data usage for free, but the alternative is that the operator might charge for something the user haven’t done which is a big no-no (can turn ugly if brought to court).

The last node between the UE and the internet is called the GGSN, which is responsible for authorisation and charging of the data packages, and thus also the main source of changing data. At minimum a GGSN CDR will contain the opening time and closing time of the CDR (the times for which the information in the CDR is valid) and the volume (number of bytes uplink and downlink), and the reason for closing the CDR. Common reasons for closing a CDR is time-limit or volume-limit, that is that the CDR has been open for too long (usually 5-15 minutes) or that too much volume is included in the CDR (amount varies with the speed of the connection, can be a couple of KB to many MB). The volume is the total volume of the data traffic including IP-headers and all.

In addition to this information more detailed information can be included which is up to the operator, but it could typically include information such as volume (and time) per service, where a service is defined by the operator but it could be Skype, Netflix, or BBC news. A service could also be the aggregation of several services that for charging purposes are considered equal (such as free services). The way that different services are detected is by packet inspection, or when needed deep packet inspection (yes, it is heavily used in mobile networks). Sometimes operators defines a number of different services but still only charges for the total volume to be able to get statistics of network usage.

The CDRs seldom contains timestamps for individual events since normally there is no single event to record, just the signalling to setup a connection to a web-server is 3 packets, sending the HTTP request to get a page is one packet and getting the page with all the content can be tens of packets so there is no single event which represents getting the page.

What kind of makes it possible to get timestamps for specific events is the fact that the UE is normally not connected to the internet, when you need some data it has to set up a connection and get it, and when the data is received it will disconnect again (usually after a timeout). This is done to preserve both the UE’s battery and to reduce the resources used in the radio network. Each of these connects and disconnects will generate a CDR.

These CDRs are sent to the billing system and I suspect that this is what is referred to with "AT&T captures your data activity nightly to create a bill record in our systems." Why they cannot use the timestamp in the CDRs I do not know, but billing systems are large and complex with lots of wrinkles and oddities.

# # #

Very interesting article. I can comment on one point:

BackPacker57 wrote:

These CDRs are sent to the billing system and I suspect that this is what is referred to with "AT&T captures your data activity nightly to create a bill record in our systems." Why they cannot use the timestamp in the CDRs I do not know, but billing systems are large and complex with lots of wrinkles and oddities.

# # #

When the iPhone was first released all CDRs with their timestamps appeared on the AT&T bill. This resulted in active users get bills with hundreds of pages. So this was probably why they went to a single summary record in the billing system.

Okay... Maybe they want to save paper pages... I would completely understand this.

But in my case for example, I have many "data" charges duriong the day AND one data charge at midnight (from many Kb to more than 200Mb!). Then this is maybe only a part of the solution, but this do not solve the problem.

And on iPhone you can constantly see your current data use. I cannot explain having 70Mb (or whatever) more when I wake up than when I went to sleep...

Piweh wrote:

Okay... Maybe they want to save paper pages... I would completely understand this.

But in my case for example, I have many "data" charges duriong the day AND one data charge at midnight (from many Kb to more than 200Mb!). Then this is maybe only a part of the solution, but this do not solve the problem.

That is explained in the thread also. It's how sessions are closed. A CDR is generated when a session closes, which they are not forthcoming about, but it appears to be releated to moving around. When you move out of the area covered by one switch into a different switches area it closes the session and generates the billing record. The one that appears in the middle of the night is for the switch you are connected to at that time. It closes based on an "end of day" rule. If it didn't and you stayed in the same place for several days the billing would get way behind actual usage.