Q: Unknown data usage early morning

Apple iPhone Phantom Strikes Again
http://www.nojitter.com/blog/229218522

AT&T and FCC Reply

Disheartening. We really aren't going to get an answer or a fix are we?

Wow. I thought I was so careful. I've had an iPhone 4 since August and so far, my data was always well below 200MB a month. I simply don't do much with my phone, other than make and receive calls, read e-mail every few days and check Facebook once a week or so. I go from home to work and have WIFI both places. I prefer the larger screen of my computer. On Feb. 11 I installed app #13 on my phone -- the CNN app. Look what happened then:


DATE TIME TO/FROM TYPE DIRECTION MSG/KB/MIN
02/11 01:59 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 11264KB
02/11 03:53 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 65407KB
02/12 12:34 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 2912KB
02/13 12:34 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 291KB
02/13 01:48 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1097KB
02/13 09:06 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 43KB
02/14 12:06 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 451144KB
02/14 05:10 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 77565KB
02/14 05:45 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 129440KB
02/15 12:39 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 750KB
02/15 05:47 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 376KB

Sorry if this gets too detailed but I think it might just possibly be pertinent.

On 2/11 I installed the app from my phone. The app did tell me it recommended I turn on push notifications so I did enable that. I streamed the live video after the big announcement in Egypt. I was in m building's basement and I checked to make sure I had a WIFI signal and that it was strong. My guess is at this point I moved in a location where the signal wasn't available or something and the video was streaming over cell data. Hard to believe because I was sitting at a table, but who knows. When I was done watching I pressed the "home" button and thought that ended my streaming session. That was 76MB on Feb. 11.

Saturday Feb. 12 and Sunday Feb. 13 I hardly picked up my phone. On Sunday evening I listened to a podcast before bedtime. Then at 12:06 am Monday I get hit with 451MB.

Monday evening I make a phone call on the way home and then at dinner I check my e-mail briefly and send one message. 77MB is logged and 129MB for those two times. This morning at 3-something a.m. I get a text message from AT&T saying I'm over my data plan limit. Then a second message an hour later.

All this is leading me to a theory.

I think I somehow started streaming the CNN video on cell data and when I pressed the home button and locked the phone, it paused. Then it resumed in the background downloading the video stream, while I listened to a podcast for 45 minutes, made a phone call for 1 minute and checked my e-mail for 5 minutes. Even though I have WIFI at home, because it started using the cell data network for the stream, it kept using it even when the WIFI was available while I listened to the podcast.

My basis for the theory is my experience with Mac OS X multi-homing networking, where I would be streaming audio on my regular Internet connection and then start a VPN connection and the stream would continue uninterrupted while all newly established traffic went over the VPN.

Alternatively, I guess the stream could have stopped and CNN and Facebook could have been pushing data to me but in that case, I can think of no reason why it would have come over the cell data network when I was at home and my WIFI network was definitely available. I was using it with my laptop.

Now, having researched cell data spikes I now know that I apparently needed to do something unintuitive and non-Apple and double-click the home button, scroll left, and close the CNN app to stop the stream. That one mistake cost me about $50. That CNN app turned out to be one expensive free app!

I see from this thread I should disable the cell data network in Settings > General > Network. I have done so. I've also uninstalled the CNN app and turned off push notifications and installed the 3rd party data monitoring app. But having to disable cell data means I'm paying $15 for a service I am required to purchase but which I won't be able to use (safely), which seems like a bad business practice to me (on AT&T's part.)

I know I'm in a very small minority in this respect, as I use an iphone with AT&T's prepaid GoPhone program. I understand that this is not supported, but its worked for me, until Friday evening (yesterday) when I discovered a $78 charge for data usage. Related to this thread, and maybe because of my situation, I discovered something that may not have been mentioned in previous posts. Please pardon me if this has been mentioned before (I've read the first 15 pages of this thread, and the last page, but nothing in between).

For several months now, I have been using a 3G phone, carefully monitoring the data use. I pay $19.99 for 100MB data. I have to be careful, because if the balance in my data plan drops to zero, I will be charged at the rate of 1 cent per KB (that's $10 per MB!).

But, until now, its been great. Really. I've been VERY happy with AT&T's go phone system, and the customer service and the account website. On a recent vacation during the last half of January, for example, I enjoyed using the web for a variety of purposes, and found that generally, I could surf the internet for a couple of hours and use something like 10MB of data (no music or video streaming).

Recently decided to upgrade to a 3GS. I finished transferring the data from my 3G to my 3GS on Thursday morning. At that time, I believe my account had about 52MB available data in the plan account. Between Thursday morning and Friday evening, I did use the internet during the day, and I would estimate that I used it about 2 hours. There was nothing different about the character of my data usage than previously. So, based on previous usage, I would have expected to draw down my data plan account by about 10MB. By contrast, and much to my dismay, my account was depleted by Friday evening, and as I mentioned previously, my account had been charged an additional $78.

Since then, I've been quite ****** off, and found this thread and have been studying my account history. There were two major data usage periods accounting for the depletion of my account, one on Thursday at 8:21PM (26,737KB), and a second on Friday at 9:23AM (23,013KB) (the latter period coinciding with the $78 charge). I noticed on my account history that each usage period of the GPRS system had an associated duration.

For example, on Thursday, the data charge of 26,737 was listed as having a "call duration" of 7hr 25min 37sec. Then, I noticed that for every single entry on my account history, if I converted the call duration to seconds, i.e. (7hrs * 60min/hr * 60sec/min) + (25min * 60sec/min) + (37 secs), the answer in seconds was equal to the number of "units charged".

THAT IS, ONE SECOND EQUALS 1KB OF DATA!

Is the GoPhone accounting system unique in this respect? Do others have a call duration listed? Are people actually paying for TIME connected to the cel data network, rather than actual KB used? Several earlier posts in this thread suggest to me that for some reason the 3GS remains connected to the cel data network even though it that connection may not actively be used, and that would correspond to the data usage pattern that I see in my account. That could be dealt with by turning off the Cel Network, which I have done for now.

Are we being charged for the wrong units? Anyone find this interesting?

You've touched on one of the theories I posted and that is are iPhone users being billed for time vs. actual bandwidth?

Results in bandwidth/throughput will vary by area of the country and even conditions (time of day, weather, geography, etc...) Remember--- iPhones are radios. I don't care what Apple or AT&T tells you or anyone---- these are radio devices using Spectrum and spectrum is impacted by the above including solar (space, sun) effects.

Now with that in mind, grab the free app Speedtest http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/speedtest-net-mobile-speed/id300704847?mt=8

Then, you may want to pay for the DataMan app to track your usage--- http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dataman-real-time-data-usage/id393282873?mt=8 and for $1.99 it pays to be proactive vs reactive with the carrier that professes it will defend itself against these claims of rigging data usage.

Hope this helps a bit and would like to hear how you fare.

Well, I wasn't incorrect to notice that the "call duration" in seconds happens to be equal to the units charged in KB. But, after doing some testing I am finding that "call duration" is likely a meaningless number. I ran a short data session on Safari for about 2 minutes and was billed for 280 KB which corresponded to the data tracked on the cel network and recorded in settings. Then, I kept the phone attached to the cel network for 15 minutes but didn't do anything and was billed for 4KB. Billing reflects data used, not time connected. I think I'll give dataman a try and run the speedtest you recommended. Thank you!

Every month I have once (either the night of 12th of 14th of the month) an unknown data-transfer - always uploads from my phone. The amount is excessive - up to 700MB in one night(!) (upload only).

I now have installed DataMan and NetStat to monitor the traffic. This month I was awake and noticed when it started. Without any actions from my side, DataMan reported, that the daily quotas are being exceeded... When checking with NetStat, which should show all TCP connections, I have NOT found any connection which showed this high amount of transferred data. Requests to Apple and T-Mobile (my provider over here) did not reveal or help anything (You may have installed an App which causes the data-transfer).

However, when this mentioned data-transfer started this month I killed several Apps from the background (including the mail-App) - then the transfer counter stopped... Currently I believe that there is a bug in the Mail-App from Apple...

Btw: The amount of transferred data is the same on my invoice, DataMan and the iPhone data-counter.

Maybe someone knows more about that or has similar problems... Asking this question in a german forum did also not reveal news...

cheers,
Mike

I went ahead and ordered Dataman. And, it is helpful in quantifying data used, and on which network, i.e. 3G or WiFi. But, I don't see any feature in that app which allows for viewing the details of the connection, that is, which application triggered the call for data and what computer server it connected to. Is there a way to get more detail on the data exchange?

I'm using "Netstat" to get more details on active connections (host, bytes received / sent, etc). Works fine...

Mike,
Do you run that directly on the iPhone, or on a computer to which the iPhone is attached?

I'm using it directly on the iPhone - it's available via the AppStore...

Something is really wrong! I just hung up with AT&T about weird data useage. Huge chunks of data over night and during time of day my wife is at school with "NO SIGNAL" in her building!

Only thing that changed is I finally updated to 4.2 on her 3GS. I find it hard to believe since she had the phone, never reset usage in 7 months the total usage is 600MB of which 100MB is the past two weeks according to AT&T usage report.

There is really something wrong.

Tom

I put my 2¢ worth in on this thread back on page 77 or 78. In that entry I mentioned that I had a call from Apple (call to my home phone 717-235-7466) and eventually talked to a second level Customer Service Rep. at Apple (Rasheed) about the problem. He, in turn, called a contact in AT&T's Project Management (or something very similar section) named James. After an hour or so on the phone, James and Rasheed determined that there was a serious error in AT&T's billing software that had not been caught during a recent update, I'm guessing shortly after the 200mb plans came into existence. This error was deducting "AT&T Maintenance Bandwidth" (server updates, etc.) from customers allocations. As I said at the time, these overages had probably been going on since day one but because it was then only an unlimited data plan, no one bothered to check nor cared. Once I and my wife went on to the 200mb plans is when we started paying attention, especially after she got a notice that she was sitting at 180mb of usage and that there were still upwards of two weeks before the end of our billing period.

I talked to Rasheed and James during the 10-11PM Eastern time frame close to the end of October. At the end of the conversation, James said he was putting in a work order to have it investigated. The next day I got two phone calls from AT&T, the first to go over the details of my complaint and verify some things on the work order and, later in the day, to advise that the work order had been submitted to those doing the trouble shooting and that they had started on it. No further calls were made but within a day, my phantom data usage disappeared, never to return.

I know it is a long shot but a call to Apple Customer Service in the same time frame just might find Rasheed on duty again and refreshing his memory and mentioning James at AT&T Project whatever it was might get some results. Unfortunately, the piece of paper I had everything written down on - including the AT&T work order number - had been sitting on my workbench for weeks and got trashed when I cleaned it off. My problem had been solved so I figured I didn't need it.

The name and cell phone numbers that were on the work order: John E. Simon, 717-586-2342, 717-586-2343. Good luck folks!!

Pardon me, I was a month off in the above note. All the discussions with Rasheed & James took place in the last week of September, not October.

Here is a link to the original thread I posted the info on.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2597310&start=0&tstart=0

I experienced same unknown usage increases after first time we sync'ed the iphone via iTunes to update OS. I also sync'ed apps normally run on the iPad to the phone. Once I deinstalled the apps (facebook, weather, etc.) and the usages disappeared. I suspect Facebook app of doing regular updates once or twice a day to the phone, but have not reinstalled any of the apps yet to confirm. You need to try one app at a time.