Q: Unknown data usage early morning

I feel compelled to respond to this thread after my personal experience. My inexplicable data usage began around June 3-5. I am located in Canada. My data consumption was around 120MB per day, and in reality I was only using about 8-9MB. Since I am diligent to check usage, I was shocked to notice this. Checking my email cost me 50MB! Something was seriously wrong and my provider was of no help. Fortunately, an Apple Genius and myself figured out the problem. I want to say outright that I do not wish to defame or cast blame on the website responsible for this bug. Also, we were able to duplicate this on any iPhone. The Genius at Apple said he had never seen anything like it and data consumption was at a rate of 10MB per second of internet activity. Leaving Macrumors.com open in a Safari tab (even though Safari had been quit) was the source. Every time data was passed through the 3G network, this page was refreshing in the background. The Genius said that it was possible that some applet was refreshing on that page. This only happened when Macrumors was loaded. I am a big fan of this particular site, but I have not visited it on the phone as I am over my usage for the month. If anyone with a generous data plan wants to correlate my story, give it a shot. Check your data usage on the phone, open Macrumors.com in Safari and allow it load. Close Safari and check your usage in settings. Go back to the home screen and wait about 10-15 seconds. Now open your settings and check again. If this bug exists still, you will be shocked. Remember to close that tab and leave Safari on a blank white page to stop this. Some people reading this may think I am full of it and that is okay. I was treated like an idiot by my service provider until I showed it to them myself. Only Apple support took it seriously and they helped me solve the problem. This issue was reported by the Apple Store and my service provider through tech support. I went out of my way to do so and I didn't even get a thank you from my Telco. At the end of the day it is my fault for leaving tabs open in Safari. Always leave a blank page on Safari when quitting it. Apple native apps do run in the background. If this helps even one of you, I am glad that I posted it. Mac heads watch each other's backs and that is why we are here. To the moderators of this forum, I hope that I am not out of line in naming the website. Please forgive me if I have violated any terms of service.

whoa!
might be something that forces a page refresh from time to time, thus if this bug is around, it should not be limited to macrumors. Very strange, though.

This, however, does not answer the fact that users are being charged at the same times. Unless, of course, these charges are daily usage, and the phones have been, throughout the day, refreshing said page. Maybe AT&T has some sort of chaotic data usage, or they simply add all the http net usage at the end of the day, and app usage throughout the day?

Anyways, should be easy enough to test, for whomever has these problems, just close all safari pages!

I always close Safari pages before exiting; any site that does automatic updates can cause data usage whether Safari is open or not. Other examples include major news sites (CNN, NYTimes, WSJ, etc). This is a common cause of premature battery depletion also.

Sorry MightyMac but I do not see this at all. The first time, loading from scratch, my phone received 915K bytes and stayed there. The second time I just hit refresh the page and it received 127K bytes and stayed there, presumably because it had some stuff cached. Something else is going on with you.

Maybe folks can list the sites that are open in tabs in Safari. Perhaps a common denominator can be found. It was by pure luck the Apple Genius and I found this as I was just replicating my daily habits. It could be other sites or the data handling of these sites that are causing the problem. Checking my usage also showed times when I was not on my phone. Since leaving a blank page in Safari, I have had no further issues. Best of luck.

I agree, I don't understand the "roll-up" explanation. If the roll-up was a duplicate of all the webpages, email, texts, etc that you ran through for the day, that might explain the size of the transfers, but that kind of recording of activity is well into the privacy invasion territory.
If roll-up is more like a web log, or bytes transferred count then the size should be very small, a few 100K at most.

MightyMac, what were the other pages you had open in Safari at the time? Why don't you try them one by one?

Last night, I turned off the 3G after finishing everything for the day. Turned phone on in am, cleared usage stats, turned on 3G, left it in the charger.

At noon, I checked it again. 28 kbs sent. Nothing being done. Fetch is still manual. Only change was turning the 3G back on.

If 3G is on, the phone seems to find the micro cell before it finds my WiFi, so there's a tiny exchange (1-3 kb).

I think this may be as low as I can get these phantom "where am I?" transfers.

I had tried several pages one by one. The lone culprit was Macrumors.com. I feel for all of you with this problem because the source is obviously different than mine. Nevertheless, it is disconcerting and I was ready to smash my beloved iPhone out of frustration. Luckily for me, I have been able to figure it out and my overages this month will only be a few dollars.

this is the sound recorded during the day being uploaded to apple/whoever

if you are in a lot of noise and conversations and stuff all day, upload will be large

if in quiet, very small upload

no ****

Message was edited by: quips

Nice try, but I absolutely never use the sound recorder, and my uploads are 1 MB to 10 MB per day.

@MightyMac - Thanks for the idea but like others I have never visited that website and typically the ones I frequent are usually formatted for iPhones so there is little auto-refreshing to worry about.

It truly seems like each case is somewhat different but also it is concerning at how diffuse the problem is. I have heard many people say that if the iPhone is in sleep mode that any Push/timed Fetch activity goes across the Edge/3G network instead of the WiFi that may be available. Is that true? Can't an iPod Touch receive Push/timed Fetch and it does not even have an Edge/3G radio? Is it just that Edge/3G is the default and WiFi secondary? (I am still on an original iPhone so only have Edge myself).

Like many others I have played around with settings on my iPhone and this is what I have seen. Before going to sleep I shut off all Notifications and also shut off Push and timed Fetch for my only email account (MobileMe) on the evening of 6/8/10 and only turned it back on during the entire day on 6/10/10 and then back off before bed on 6/10/10. I did not shut off my phone. I know I used my phone on Edge during the day on 6/10/10 on several occasions. Otherwise I will admit I did not use my phone outside of WiFi use, but that is typical for me.

Here are the current results:

06/11 04:48 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1KB
06/10 05:31 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 957KB
06/09 04:48 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 78KB
*06/08 02:00 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 2598KB*
06/07 08:00 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 227KB
06/07 10:58 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 729KB
*06/07 02:12 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1226KB*
06/06 01:12 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 2641KB
*06/06 02:19 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 473KB*
06/05 04:19 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 4201KB
*06/05 02:23 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1500KB*
*06/04 02:23 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1492KB*

I had large data charges at 2-3am on 6/4 through 6/8 but then none since changing the settings overnight. Now the daytime charges on 6/5/10 and 6/6/10 are definitely days I accessed EDGE while using my phone so those larger chunks make sense, but not the other middle of the night ones. If this is just accounting why would the chunks of data drop off as soon as I disable Push/Fetch/Notification in the evening only. And where are the entries for when I accessed data on 6/10/10 during the day? It just doesn't make sense. If AT&T is going to start offering Capped Plans then they better get their bookkeeping sorted out since all of us are now going to scrutinize every charge compared to not even glancing at it when we were all on unlimited plans!

I didn't say YOU were the one recording

Since my initial posting on 6/9/10, this is my TOTAL usage since killing all Fetch/Push, and all Auto-Syncing of apps:

06/11 02:42 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 76KB
06/10 03:42 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 598KB
06/10 02:49 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1KB
06/09 02:49 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 868KB

I should note that I also have been refraining from using my phone to move any data unless I know I am connected to Wifi. Today I reset my Usage Data, and I will move data at specific times on Edge intentionally to see if they show up when they happen in my stats. And then we'll see if my mystery usage spikes for this so-called 'catch-up' transfers.