Unknown data usage early morning

This started happening out of the blue on my mom's Iphone 3G:

325MB on Halloween!

Called ATT they said it's her fault. No way she uploaded 325mb of anything. She doesn't know how!

My money's on the Rocketmail server continually refreshing the feed to your Mum's phone. Presumably this is a Webmail connection via Safari? She needs to ensure she disconnects properly, shutting down the Webmail and Safari session cleanly. I got bitten by a similar issue on day 1 of my iPhone4 usage !

No, she doesn't use the web browser hardly. Her email is setup through the mail program and has been setup this way since she got the phone 3 years ago. I just don't see any reasonable reason why her phone would upload (not download) 325MB of data.

OK, that's really weird. I also have a huge data transfer on Halloween -- two, actually. One over 40K and one over 116K! I have no idea what I could possibly have been doing that would have used that much data.

If you have an unlimited messaging plan, it's important that you TURN OFF iMESSAGE! iMessage will count against your data plan if you aren't on WiFi, so all those pictures you send and receive to/from and iPhone will count against your data if you aren't on WiFi. iMessage is completely unneccessary if you have an unlimited messaging plan or don't go over your messaging allotment.

40K and 116K are not huge. They're not even big. That would be a couple of email checks, some push notifications, etc. Or did you mean MB instead of KB? (A factor of 1000 different!) Then you would have something to wonder about. 40KB is noise.

Add me to the list of unwanted data users. I got one message from ATT a few days ago saying I'd used 65% of my data. I was surprised, I never got a message about my data usage before. I always use WiFi when available, which is about 90% of the time. I don't stream data, movies or anything else. Just browse some forums and check email, that's it!

So this morning I get another text from ATT saying I've used 90% of my data plan. What the heck? 250MB in a couple of days?!? I've been on WiFi at home for the entire weekend!

So I check my bill:

11/11 - 414MB at midnight? What the ****?!?

11/08 - 225MB again, early AM. More WT*!

Scatterted throughout are large data transfers that I didn't make. I send maybe a dozen MMS messages a month, tops.

What the heck is going on? The rest of the bill for this month looks the same starting the beginning of the month.

That's great advice if one could spend the time looking through 97 pages of posts. I don't have that time.

Also, regardless of whether or not the data usage is aggregate or not, the amount used is the problem.

There is NO WAY I willingly or knowingly used 600 MB of data over the last week.

You just proved it. Only happens on iPhones. So it's something on the iPhone that isn't on the HTC or BB. With 300,000 apps (compared to none for the HTC and a dozen for the BB) are you surprised? If it was an AT&T problem then all phones would be affected equally, don't you think?

Just chiming in---

1. This issue is an issue, is it not?

(Of course this issue needs to be clearly defined - it's not late night data usage or early morning--nothing to do with the "one-time" report AT&T receives from the iPhones)

2. The "issue" not the SYMPTOMS is a moving target.

a)Which iPhone

b)Which iPhone OS

c)Which carrier?

What's reasonable?

Is it really reasonable for all the gimmicks, tricks, work-arounds that either AT&T, Apple or App makers to expect iPhone users to do? SMARTPHONE ring-a-bell?

Yes, it's an issue, and a serious one for users on limited data plans. It's the subject of an FCC rulemaking in the USA as well as legal action. The issue is, as you point out, the fact that the iPhone sends or receives much more data than users expect or can predict. Not when it happens, or how it happens. (BTW, it is not a report that AT&T receives from the iPhone. AT&T does not get reports from the phone, it gets reports from its switches when the connection is closed. Switches force the connection to be closed once a day if it hasn't been closed earlier by opening a connection on another switch).

It happens with all models of iPhones, and all versions of iOS except 1.x. It was first reported in June, 2010, but that is probably because that's when unlimited plans started to be phased out. No one tracked their data usage before then.

It happens with many carriers, however, no one has tried to identify all of the carriers involved. The "nighttime" usage aspect is probably an artifact of which billing system the carrier uses; there are only a few producers of cellular billing systems in the world.

At least some of it is to be expected. If you use data-intensive apps you will use a lot of data. These include multiplayer games, audio and video streaming services, news apps that update in real time, social networking apps that update in near real time, etc. Facebook is a huge data hog if you set it to track everyone and everything.

Some of it is probably buggy apps that keep retrying sending data when a connection fails.

With a few carriers it is likely a true billing error; this appears to be especially common with international roaming.

(All of the above information has been gleaned from following the thread for 17 months; there's nothing that I claim is original except the observation that there are only a small number of billing system producers which I know because I work in the field.)

I was alerted to the higher than expected data usage when both me and my girlfriend changed our tariffs. in the UK the trend has gone from providing unlimited data to a couple of different limited options...so now it means you have to pay attention. So when she got told she had used 80% of her allowance we started to investigate and find all of the above.

There seems to be a few different theories and possibilities so I did my own tests, still in the middle of them but did this.

Downloaded DataMan Free version just to see the real time increase in usage.

Logged every 4 or 5 minutes the amount of data used. Now I was trying various things for the first hour so the data will be a little skewed but hopefully not massively.

First hours usage 3051 K

Then the changes

Switched off Siri - Virtually no impact

Switched off Location Services - Little/no impact

Switched of Diagnostic & Usage Reporting to Apple - Nothing yet but hoping it has an effect later

Switched off Mail Fetch/Push - IMPACT

Hour two showed no increase in data usage...Probably hear some of you shouting of course not you turned everything off lol.

I switched back on mail fetch and push set for every 15 minutes. 100K of use instantly, even though no messages were downloaded, and of course to some extent obvious.

I think this is just a case of management. So, I am going to slowly turn back on the various options, excluding Diagnostic & Usage reporting, and see what impact that has.

I think E-mail probably uses a lot more than we suspect and the Diagnostic & Usage Reporting certainly seems to send an unreasonable amount of data and at a time we would consider we are aren't using our phone, Apple are :-)

I'll update with the effect of the other services but it seems like it's just a case of sensible settings in a world where we get sent a lot more stuff electronically.

Canada, UK, Norway and Hong Kong and I haven't tracked the carriers-- I think it would take a little time to discover them-- some are mentioned in this thread (oh gee-- how many pages?) 😢

Last summer UK users on holiday got surprises:

Another iPhone glitch: Holidaymakers hit with huge bills for surfing web abroad - even with internet switched OFF

Then, note an app maker's comment:

according to Kengwei, "Some apps can go on for 10 minutes before the iOS watchdog kills it. It depends on how an app is designed by the developers."

ref: iPhone Data Pains

Also, note from a forum comment about AT&T's billing process:

How a law firm tested "phantom" AT&T smartphone data use

the comment in the forum:

"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 hasn’t done, which is a big no-no (can turn ugly if brought to court)."

# # # # # #

Now--- does or has anyone had success in running a concurrent packet trace of an iPhone for both Cellular and WiFi usage? IF so, how did you do it?

kramrolyat70 - That's an excellent procedure and I have done the same with mail push, which I haven't ever used, but was thinking it might solve some other problems for me. I found it's not worth it, so email push is still off on my phone.

In addition to the kind of testing kramrolyat has done, it's worthwhile checking your data usage (via DataMan - I highly recommend the Pro version), opening a suspect app, closing app in a few minutes, and checking DataMan again. I was able to rule out quite a few suspects that way.

If you have push off for apps like FaceBook, you aren't going to have a problem. I check FaceBook several time a day on my phone, and even on cellular data, it doesn't use too much. Google maps, OTOH, is a real hog, and I'm careful with it.

I don't think there's an app that will show you data usage by app. I've looked and not found, but if you are willing to do a little testing, as described above, DataMan can give you the info you need.

BackPacker57 wrote:

Now--- does or has anyone had success in running a concurrent packet trace of an iPhone for both Cellular and WiFi usage? IF so, how did you do it?

If you control the router it would not be difficult, but COULD be expensive. You'd need a packet monitor such as WireShark, which is an expensive product (except for the free PC version that only monitors that specific PC).

One thing I didn't mention is that most users are not aware that the iPhone turns off WiFi when the phone is asleep to extend battery life. While WiFi uses less power than cellular, it uses it continuously, while cellular only uses power when actually transmitting. So, if your phone is asleep it will not use WiFi for data even if you are within range of a WiFi hotspot.