Unknown data usage early morning

igmackenzie wrote:

There have been quite a few threads on this subject. In the UK, there are many instances of data usage on all networks happening exactly at midnight.

No, data usage is not happening exactly at midnight. Accumulated data usage is reported to the billing system at exactly midnight. You have no way of knowing when the data usage actually occurred unless you install an app to monitor data usage, such as Dataman.

Sorry Lawrence, but yes I do know exactly when it is happening from the itemised Vodafone bill each month. All the cellular data entries are recorded down to the second. This midnight issue has been discussed often.

I had to laugh about your Wi-fi going off in standby to 'preserve battery'!! I lose between 40% and 60% of battery overnight with the phone sitting on a table! If that is 'preserving the battery' then I hate to think what would happen if it wasn't preserving the battery!

WiFi uses power continuously when it is on, unlike cellular, which only uses power when it is sending (and a little when it is receiving). If WiFi were on all the time the phone would only last a few hours.

I fully understand that Lawrence, I was just amused by the 'preserving battery power' statement considering the appalling situation there, that's all. I wasn't asking a serious question, purely rhetorical.

So somebody please explain why suddenly after a year and a half the Iphone is so much trouble. I do not plan on having to continually babysit my phone everynight to make sure it is doing what is was suppose to in the first place oh and pay an outrageous bill on top of it.

Yep, read that and I'm aware. We have been turning cellular data off as often as possible including all night for some time, this week we have been turning off cellular data and putting the phone in airplane mode. We are still blasting through data. I just got the December bill today and noticed a single data transfer of 743MB! This happened on a vacation day at 12:39AM. That is a ton of data, I can't even imagine what it is doing.

As far as I know, iPhone apps can only do the follwoing in the background,

- Audio streaming

- Voice over IP...Skype...etc

- Location services

- Push notifications

- Local notifications

- Task completion - there is some set time limit where apps can complete what they are working on while you switch to another app

I've streamed music for nearly 8 hours straight and didn't use that much data. We do nothing with picture uploads...video...etc.

So sure...wifi uses battery and shuts down when the phone sleeps I understand that. But prior to our 3GS, in the early morning hours I see cell data transfers of 23kb...8kb...etc. But not hundreds and hundreds of MBs. My wife is using the same streaming apps she used on her 3GS, pandora and npr. In fact she setup this phone from a backup of the 3GS...she's using the same apps and we believe we have all the new iOS features shut off.

I've also confirmed on my 4S...it is using the cellular data at night when the phone is sleeping as you have explained but like her 3GS, mine is only sending up 40kb or less.

I'm starting to wonder if someone is spoofing our sim or something....maybe we'll shut it down and take out the sim for a couple days and see what happens.

I've noticed recently that I reach my limit earlier and earlier in the month. At first I thought it was because I switched streaming music services, but I realized that wasn't the case. I too am having late night/early morning charges. They are absolutely absurd. I'm talking 200,000 KB to over 400,000 KB occurring hours after I've gone to sleep. What is going on with this and how do I make these numbers go down? After I hit the 2 GB monthly limit, AT&T severely decreases my data speed. This is not fair as I am not using this data at the times specified. It's been hindering my workflow and ability to do everything the iPhone should allow me to do (e.g. Multitask). My last bill shows 17 different times data exceeding 100,000 was transferred.

In Reply to Greygoose66: The usage was in the early hours of the morning across 3 separate days (when the wifi was not on) and totalled a massive $ 700 of data

My problem is with my iphone 3G (carrier TestraClear via Vodafone NZ). My usage per month has been July 68mb, Aug 30mb, Sep 17mb, Oct 12mb, Dec 40mb but for Nov I got a bill for an extra NZ$360 for 694mb which were all clocked up from 12 midnight to 5am on 24 November 2011. There was a total of 696 entries over this 5 hour period on the usage meter and this was at a time when my phone was not in use and charging.

TestraClear maintained that I (or someone else must have been using the phone at that time) which was not possible. They could not tell me what had used this data (due to privacy reasons) and that I would have to pay for this extra data use.

I have read most of the posts on this thread and not sure if my problem is similar to most as usage is not creeping up - a bit worried that phone may have been somehow tapped. Would appreciate hearing from anyone particularly in the Australia/New Zealand zone who may have also experienced this problem.

This may be covered ground, but...

At least two phones in my family plan with AT&T - a 4 and a 4S - are doing massive uploads in the middle of the night, when they should be a) on wifi and b) not uploading stuff at all.

AT&T clearly doesn't know, they just assume the iphone or a third party app is updating stuff in the middle of the night. I suspect they are right.

Apple (despite this lengthy thread) seems clueless, except to say that it shouldn't be happening. I am currently suspecting iCloud, and have done this: Settings > iCloud > Documents & Data > turn "Use Cellular" off. That seems too easy and probably won't work, but it's worth a shot. It's the only setting I can find that breaks out "cellular" data in iCloud.

I may turn iCloud off entirely, if that doesn't work. iCloud specifically admits that it uploads to the cloud in the middle of the night - it's just not supposed to use the cellular network to do it. I could imagine any number of apps with poorly-written updates trying to dso the same thing. We'll see.

Dasago wrote:

This may be covered ground, but...

At least two phones in my family plan with AT&T - a 4 and a 4S - are doing massive uploads in the middle of the night, when they should be a) on wifi and b) not uploading stuff at all.

It's not just covered ground, it is covered, and covered, and covered, and covered, and covered...

a) WiFi is off whenever the screen is off to preserve battery. So it is not on WiFi when you think it is. Unless you leave it plugged in overnight; if it is plugged in WiFi remains on.

b) It isn't uploading stuff at night. The nightly numbers you see are a summary of data transfers during the previous 24 hours. Cell sites report summarized data to the billing system when you transfer to a new cell, but the last cell that you are in reports usage from that cell at a specified time. That is the number you see, the last connection being closed out.

c) It isn't all uploads; it is data transfers in both directions even though it is labeled as "sent".

You still may have an issue of where the data comes from. iOS 5 added several features that use data, so you should expect the usage to be greater with iOS 5 than it was with iOS 4 or earlier. You have already identified iCloud as a data user. There are also a number of new services and apps that use data supported by the phone. Go to Settings/Notifications to see all of them. ALSO go to Settings/Location Services, scroll to the bottom, and tap System Services. All of these use data. Some are innocuous, such as Compass Calibration and Cell Network Search, but Diagnostics and Usage sends data to Apple periodically, Location-based iAds does, Traffic can send a lot of data, and Setting Time Zone is unnnecessary if you have time sync set to Auto.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

b) It isn't uploading stuff at night. The nightly numbers you see are a summary of data transfers during the previous 24 hours. Cell sites report summarized data to the billing system when you transfer to a new cell, but the last cell that you are in reports usage from that cell at a specified time. That is the number you see, the last connection being closed out.

c) It isn't all uploads; it is data transfers in both directions even though it is labeled as "sent".

Thanks. Those two issues are what threw me - clearly I don't have some kind of data vampire going on, it's just an artifact in the usage reports from AT&T. I'm not really shocked I've been using a lot of data.

In any event, your post is the most useful insight I've gotten, so thanks again.

I called AT&T becausenI had a similar experience. One question. Where are you getting your usage data. There is a Data Usage in the billing Hostory report. For me, 6 days into my billing cycle, it says 1009MB used, but when. Check the My AT&T app or the *DATA# they both report 46MB. The AT&T rep also reports 46MB. So the point is the Billing History report is clearly reporting something different.

Hope that helps.

I was checking useage in their app, *Data# but also tracking in the phones Settings by following the useage. Someone on this thread mentioned DataMan Pro, I picked that up and it's been awesome for helping narrow this down.

Since posting to this discussion, rather than turning off all the iCloud features, I ended up deleting the account. Also, comparing my wife's 4S with the data issue to my 4S that isn't having the issue, I noticed she is leaving bluetooth on all the time and her car auto connects to her phone every time we start it. Fearing that the connection to the car could somehow be left open (I'm sure unlikely) we started turning bluetooth on only when needed.

We also started using the DataMan pro app mentioned in this thread. So far we have not had any more run away data and we even stopped disabling cellular data in the night. DataMan, the phones data useage stats in the phone and the AT&T reporting have been matching.

I'm just going to keep watching and then if we are not having any more issues, maybe I'll start slowly enabling things again. It's great we are no longer killing data but it sure would be nice to use the features the phone is actually known for.

Deleting my wife's iCloud setup solved the problem with late night data transfers. However my son's iPhone 3Gs continues to have 20-40 MB 3G data transfers showing up each morning around the time we leave the house when I take him school.

He did have iCloud and we deleted it from the phone.

At home the phone is connected to WIFI. I did a reinstall this weeked but the data transfer showed up again as happening yesterday morning when I checked on AT&T's website this morning.

Ideas?

I don't know if I turned off the iCloud settings. I may have just deleted it. Might that be it?