Unknown data usage early morning

this is from data manager application between 7am and 8am, I was at bath had breakfast and drive. look at the data downloads both from 3g and wifi. It can be some application but after 8 am ıt just stops without any intervention. Any ideas ? (iphone 4)

I was suspicious of AT&T data usage billing for sometime and today I have a proof that they inflate data usage by a huge margin (like 3000%). I have captured a screen shot from the AT&T data usage report that shows that I used 106MB of data in two minutes on 9/26/12 between 5:54PM and 5:56 PM. At that time I was driving back from my office and listening to a radio that has a max bitrate of 128kb/sec. I plugged in these numbers to compute the maximum data consumed for 2 minutes should not be more than 2MB (e.g., 128000 [128kb/sec rate] * 60*2 [2 min] / 8 [bits] ~ 2MB).

What a scam! I'm furious.

• double tap the home button to bring up the task bar
• press and hold any application that is running but you no longer want to be running
• then press the minus sign on that application to actually stop it from running
• target any streaming, location aware, and advertising supported applications first

Dear Nancy:

As I and a number of other people have noted in previous posts on this topic, here are a few key points re unusual data usage, WiFi and cellular links:

> AT&T's billing system generated excessive and erroneous data charges on my son's iPhone, including a period when he was in the hospital, his iPhone was not being used, and had no power. To AT&T's credit, I was able to speak to a customer service manager who removed these overcharges. This happened at least three times in one year. To successfully negotiate a credit, however, it is very helpful to have a third party data logger, e.g. Onavo or Dataman Pro, which will also identify data use by application, to help you find any 'data hogs'. When I described our Dataman Pro logs to the AT&T manager and offered to send him a copy, he quickly agreed to credit our account.

> If you notice massive data charges that always seem to occur around midnight, these are supposedly "rollups", where AT&T's billing system aggregates data charges that occured across multiple areas throughout the day. The curious thing: if you completely disable cellular service at night (see the notes below), these 'rollups' disappear.

> If you turn off cellular service at night and do not connect your iPhone to a charger, it will automatically revert to cellular service -- without any notice. So... to ensure that your iPhone doesn't "wake up" and allow all of those cellular data charges to start flowing again, disable cellular service AND make sure your iPhone is plugged into a charger. (Our son just selects 'Airplane mode' when he plugs his phone into the charger, which is quicker and easier.)

> In addition to all of the above, some apps can gobble large volumes of data -- without any notice. Automated iCloud backups, for example. 'Free' email apps also push graphic, audio and video ads, which can quickly add megabytes to your bill. For example, the TextFree messaging app from Pinger continues to push ads 'behind the scenes' -- even if you pay for the "ad free" option! (The ads are simply hidden, but not the data charges!) As noted above, tools are available to help you identify 'data hogs', e.g. Onavo and Dataman Pro.

I hope this is helpful to you and others. Please search for "MHays" for more details on our problems with AT&T, and the things we found.

Mark Hays

This problem is not only a ATT problem. I'm living in Switzerland with Swisscom as operator. As I received a message this week that I used all my 500Mo data (that for sure I did not), I completely checked the bill.

It appears that quite everynight at exactly 00:00:00 many data were transfered...

The biggest transfer was on 01.01.2011, 00:00:00 : 1'126 Mo were transfered ! Hoepfully, at this time I had an unlimited data transfer plan.

And now since January, I have 3.88Go of datas that are only those "night transfers".

I passed two full days trying to find an answer on internet, but this topic is the most complete.

I called Swisscom : they can not cancel the data fees as it comes from my phone and it is "my" responsibility.

I called two apple support people : no one has ever heard about this problem.

Then I linked them to this topic and I hope they will maybe have a look.

When I called about having gone over my limit (similar to many other stories), I was told that their app always uses their data network, even when the phone is on WiFi.

The AT&T rep you spoke too is lying. I think they may have even been plain guessing, which is still lying in my book. Check out the pic showing my being in the app while in airplane mode with on wifi enabled. Proof positive. I hope this lawsuit goes through for us customers. They won't change if they're not forced by law.

I have been following a similar thread on "ieverythingcafe" since my usage suddenly mushroomed for no discernible reason in March, 2011, and then skyrocketed in April, 2011. One of the things that mystified me (beyond the fact that I had no data hogging apps, no video streaming etc.) was that the lifetime usage on my iphone continues to say 109mb after one year of use! One tech told me that this was because data usage was reset to zero every time there was an update to the OS. (Not true, by the way. I checked on that myself.) I finally got to a tech who gave me the work-around tip of turning off cellular data, unless I wanted to connect to the internet through 3g. That did the trick. I am attaching a picture of AT&T's report of my data usage for the past six months. It shows my typical small usage for January and February, then the mushrooming in March and April (April was particularly significant in that I was out of the country for two weeks and had my iphone on "Airplane Mode" the whole time. Then May and June show what happened after I turned cellular data off. It sure is fishy.

I have been able to duplicate runaway data usage (about 94MB in 7 minutes) in a way that might be of interest to some:

My daughter has a pre-paid SIM installed in an iPhone 3GS. The provider is Speakout, which rents bandwidth on the Rogers network in Canada. Speakout supports only limited 3G data for browsing, i.e., because of port blockages, it does not support app store downloads, Find My iPhone, etc.

I decided to see what would happen if I tried to download an app update from the app store. The download appeared to initiate and the busy icon spun around on the status bar for several minutes, then the download attempt eventually timed out with an error message. During that time, the phone appeared to download 94MB of data ⚠, as reported by both Dataman and the built-in counter.

I don't know why the phone would think it had received 94MB of data when there was a port blocked, preventing the transfer, but possibly this was the result of a packet being retried a zillion times or something like that.

This leads me to hypothesize that some of the unexplained usage described in this thread may be due to network issues, where data packets are retried many times, racking up the meter without achieving any results.

This theory is bolstered by the experience of user skegley, who ran up a large amount of transfers while traveling on a train in Europe (see here and here).

Dataman summary:

Dataman detail:

Built-in counter:

So, my wife's phone has started using massive data again. It's the same problem with the Mail App when it can't connect to one of her IMAP email accounts for some unknown reason. It just sits there and spins trying to connect to the mail server and uses up to a Gigabyte a day trying to connect. This first happened on her old phone (iPhone4/iOS4) back in October and I diagnosed it down to the mail app (discussion back on page 94 or 95 of this thread. Somewhere in there...). Anyways, it hasn't happened since then, and now she has an iPhone4S running iOS5.1 and it started doing it again in March. It did it for a couple days and used 2.5GB of data, but it stopped and she didn't go over her 4GB plan. But I reset the usage counter at the beginning of the month and it has already Sent 1.6GB data since then. Ugh. Apple needs to fix this. No reason the phone should be re-trying a thousand times a second or whatever it is when it can't connect to the server. I know this is a different problem than many of you are having, and maybe it should be a separate thread, but in case it helps someone, check your Mail accounts and make sure they can each be updated successfully to rule this problem out. When this happens, the inbox for the specific account won't ever update. It just spins and spins and eventually you get a popup saying it can't access the server, but it doesn't stop trying.... ever. Until it randomly stops again at some point.

The other telltale sign it's a mail app problem is that if you reset your cellular usage counter, you'll see the Sent data skyrocket while the Received is tiny. My wife uses about 300MB a month usually, but in the last 4 days she has Sent 1.6GB and received 61Mb.

Here's a snip from the ATT billing. 400MB in 2 hours. Yikes:

Just to add my own 2 cents - I have been using DataMan Pro for a while now and there is always 3G and Wifi activity every night even though the phone is always connected to Wifi. It almost always seems to be caused by "iCloud Service" or "Mail" and was much higher when I was sync-ing more with iCloud and had Mail Push enabled.

I just got my son an iPhone 5 for Christmas. We added him to my Fiance account (she has a iPhone 4S) and in the past she used about 500MB, so I got them the 2GB plan. I had to increase to the 4GB plan as just before the cycle ended, they were at 1.99 GB. Anyway, my iPhone 5 is a company phone but I am the Admin for our account. I logged in and saw that I was using about 1GB a month. I was wondering why he was using more than me. I started to look into and he had about 1 GB in a month in data charges in the middle of the night. I was shocked. I am testing several things to figure out what it exactly is. I am tunring off the location based services iAds tonight to see if that does anything. My guess it is APPS doing this (he has quite a few games on his hone where I do not). The only time he is on LTE is when he turns phone on his way home on the bus. When he gets home, he has WIFI at his mothers, and my house as well.

Here is how his looks for the past few weeks. I missed a few days with the screen shots, but you get the point. Look at the times....Odd....1 am...4am etc. He is 12 and goes to bed about 9pm and wakes about 630 am for school. There are allot of DL's that of course are legit.

Explain this, data COMPLETELY DISABLED since morning of 1/28/13 - still getting DL's. ***? We restored his iPhone tonight and going to go stock, no App Store Apps for a day or so. I think it is a rogue app somehow still usng data even thought it is TURNED OFF. See below.