Unknown data usage early morning

I got my own iPhone July 22 and, being aware of these data issues (though my wife's experiences dating back to last Oct.), I was extremely careful with data usage. I made sure I was on WiFi at home, etc....In checking data usage, I noticed my wife had a 500MB data usage one night. She had not used this much data in the past 4 months. In speaking to the rep, I got the same crap runaround...open apps, wifi going out, going to 3G when phone is in sleep. None of this explains why someone's data usage - with no new apps or streaming being used - would spike this way. The rep said there was no way to tell WHAT the data was being used for, ir by which app. He insisted it was a poblem with my WiFi network (his claim - my network must go out at 12:41 EVERY NIGHT and that ATT or some mystery app happens to use that precise moment to transfer huge amounts of data).

I asked the rep if I could then speak to the legal department. Since there are at least 2 lawsuits pending against ATT for this issue, I have to suspect that their legal department will have a more specific response to the judge than "we're not sure" or "it must be some app." I never got that far. The supervisor came on, gave me the same spiel, a $50 credit and brushed me off. So I made a couple calls and am now party to the class action (if it is allowed to go forward).

In the meantime, my wife and I have taken to keeping 3G off at all times, unless we are away from wifi for an extended period and need to check e-mail or a web site or something. Guess what...? No problems so far.

We still get calls and texts, just have to manually check mail. Pain but seems to be a reasonable solution for the time being.

Interestingly, the rep also told me the iPhone data usage meter was never accurate and I could not use that to track usage. More interestingly, when I got my 1st month statement, my phone data usage and the statement data usage were within 100kb of one another. I reset, and so far, both are showing accurate. So they lie, too.

Source: iPhone Users: No Mercy For Phantom Data Usage

"AT&T argues that there is a misunderstanding on how users consume data and are billed for it after responding to another lawsuit brought against the carrier. Thornton, Davis & Fein, a law firm of Miami, FL paid independent researchers $80,000 to test the iPhone data usage and found that AT&T overcharged iPhone and iPad users between 7% and 300% for data usage. This is the second lawsuit, with a prior suit brought earlier in January that went to the Supreme Court in April that ruled 5-4 in AT&T's favor that companies can block unhappy customers (consumers and businesses) from banding together in a class-action lawsuit."

Are you certain you are part of a class-action?

I read your post and no malice was intended.

The misinformation in this thread is astonishing and that was the basis of my question to you, nothing more.

There is no banding together of users for class-actions and that SCOTUS decision has yet to sink in to the public's mind.

As for this thread it means every user is on his/her own to seek relief and resolution however they can.

The remaining lawsuit is contested of course by AT&T however, on Capital Hill:

Senators Kohl, Klobuchar Press AT&T For More Clear And Accurate Billing Practices

I tried to read this 90+ pages and saw all the discussion about AT&T. I live in Turkey and on Turkcell has the exact same problems both on iphone 3gs and 4. In one instance, at the while ı was driving to work, Turkcell says I downloaded 0.5gb of data in one hour. Had similar unexpected downloads now and than since last year. Now I use an aplication called dataman and it alerts me when I reach certain limits. I had all the same arguments with Turkcell you had with AT&T. All the operators are the same I think. I had the same answers you got from AT&T the only difference is they were in Turkish 🙂.

Similar problmes were discussed in many froms with many carriers like Telstra, Vodafone etc. So I still think this must be an iphone issue. With dataman I was able to see the exact time of the phantom downloads and stopped arguing with Turkcell. I think we need an application to show us which application was downloading data at specific time. Does any one know any application like that ? or it can be a good idea for developers to write an application for this purpose.

i don't think it's an iphone issue because within these 90 pages are people saying they have different phones, such as a blackberry, and the same problem. there are 2 iphone4's in my house and we don't have the problem. heck i just told my wife last night she needs to use more of her data plan...

I had the same thing. In the end I just wiped the whole phone, reinstalled OS and voila! No more mystery charges. Now as to what is causing this, I don't know. Virus? Faulty code? But very annoying, especially having to deal with ATT service drones.

I have the same exact problem. I'm not currently in the US, though. I'm on MTN. I've turned off all of the notifications and push features. It's been a while that i've been looking for an answer to this and there's been no success. I don't see this ever solve 😟 I just keep my cellular data turned off while i don't need it. This is the only way to keep it under control.

Hi to all the bewildered gang........I've just joined tonight after having a warning text from O2 (my provider here in the UK) saying I'd also nearly used all my data allowance - which of course I hadn't, it was the mysterious midnight thief.

So, following the basic concensus of opinion that, in the short term at least, the best thing to do was to turn off the cellular network facility (on my iphone4), I happened to look at the account details for the cellular data network.

It gives the O2 website address that seems to be connected with the data usage (idata.o2.co.uk), and then a username and password that I've never set up!

Is that normal?

fizz

Just wanted to bump this some. I've had the same problem described repeatedly above, and am wondering if it has something to do with the region I'm in. I just moved to NYC from the Midwest, and suddenly I'm blowing through data much, much faster than normal, including the phantom early morning charges. This despite the fact that I actually use my phone for data less here because I'm almost always connected to wifi or at my computer. Is it possible the iPhone uses more background data in some areas than in others?

I don't think that's it. I've always lived in NYC, and only had this happen to me once. I didn't have early morning charges, but huge data "sends" that were unexplained at various times of day. I now keep data turned off except when I have to use it. I also close all apps that may connect to the internet as soon as I'm done with them. With just 3 days to go on my billing cycle, I've used all of 22 MB, or 11% of what I'm paying for. This is fairly typical for me, and shows how ridiculous it is that I would ever have gone over my allotted 200 MB.

Bump it up again. I will be leaving AT&T and the iPhone behind as soon as our contract runs out. My wife is a stay-at-home mom with the 200MB data plan. On one certain day, she dropped our son at school and went to the grocery store (less than 2 hours away from our home and wifi). AT&T says she used 162,131KB of data that day. For reference, the days the rest of that week were all easily under 1,000KB. She doesn't stream any video or audio. AT&T gave the same BS runaround they gave us the last time it happened and the only solution is to shut off the data altogether. I don't know if it's AT&T's fault or Apple's fault, but it is one or the other.

I finally figured out what was using so much data on my wife's iPhone 4. In our case it is the Mail app, and specifically when it has trouble connecting to an IMAP mail account that she has from her website (imap.secureserver.net). the phone gets in this mode where it can't connect to the imap server apparently, and when it's in this mode it is sending about 5MB of data per minute. I have seen it happen twice while I was trying to figure out what was using the data. When it happens, the busy icon next to the 3G icon just spins continuously and if you check your data usage (Go to Settings->General->Usage and reset the stats), you can see it sending about 5MB/min and receiving nothing. It can do this on her phone for several hours straight. It sent 1.2GB one day and 725MB the next day. This is clearly an iPhone bug that Apple needs to fix. there is no reason the phone should be sending that much data trying to connect to a mail server. Something is very wrong. It's not ATT's fault, the phone is using the data they are charging for. I updated her phone from 4.3.3 to 4.3.5 iOS and it still does it every couple days or so. She can tell when it is in that mode becasue she won't get mail on that account for a couple hours straight. Sure enough if you go to the inbox for that account the busy icon is just spinning. Check if you have an IMAP mail account, you might have the same problem happening. File feedback to Apple so they will fix it.

Great! That actually makes sense. I'll see what I can do about it. In the meantime, we got an email from AT&T this morning that she's over her limit and charging us $15, even though she turned off the data several days ago.

I was told by an ATT in store rep that a phone call to ATT support should enable a cancellation of the overage charges. We haven't tried it yet, but that's what we were told.

Personally, I think joining the class action against Apple is becoming more of a possibility.

Ted Landau at Macworld.com has an article about this subject and quotes this thread:

"Bugs & Fixes: AT&T (over?)charges for mystery data usage"

http://www.macworld.com/article/162603/2011/09/att_overcharge.html#lsrc.nl_mwwee k_t_cbstories