Q: Unknown data usage early morning

mikalm wrote:

 

Since my problem is that I am allegedly getting data usage, when I am not even using my iphone, I don't see how either app can help me track down the source.  Am I missing something?

Dataman will tell you WHEN you are using data. Not which app. But you can't tell from the bill, as the timestamp on the data usage on your bill is the time the billing system recorded it, not the time the data transfer happened (which has probably been stated 1,000 times in this thread already).

That's what I thought.  I'm not really concerned with WHEN, if I can't find out WHAT!

My wife started having a similar problem since last two moths. The data usage of her iPhone has been increasing rapidly going beyond 200MB limit per month. I suspected video downloads and some apps she installed but finally I found the cause. After disabling Yahoo email account on her phone and the large data transfer immediately stopped.  If you search for "Yahoo mail data hog" you will find good amount of reports about the problem. It is said to be caused by the way Yahoo mail imap server responds to iphone (and Windows phone) imap access and that ends up in unnecessarily huge amount of data transfer. So our solution was to switch to live.com email which provides nice pop access instead of imap.

Now I want to know how many of the people here are affected by this Yahoo mail problem.

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 mom does use Rocketmail (IE Yahoo before yahoo).

Wonder if that is the issue.

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.

d'oh, yes of course, 40 and 115 MB, or 40,000 and 115,000 KB, but not what I actually typed.

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.

::sigh:: Do people always post to message threads without even scanning the posts first?

1. The large data transfers are not large data transfers. The are the accumulated data transfers over a period of time.
2. They do not occur at the time shown on the bill. That is the time the accumulated data transfers were posted to the billing system.
3. The accumulated total is arbitrarily shown as "sent", however, the total includes both sent and received.

It's important to understand this so you can figure out what caused the data transfers. If you look for something that happened at midnight it won't be there. You need to look over the course of a day. You can get an app like dataman that will tell you when each transfer occured, and optionally where you were when it occurred.

The data transfers really happened. You need to figure out which app or apps are responsible for them. Start with those that use Notifications. And if you have Facebook or other social networking apps it is probably one of them. Unless you use the Maps app, which uses a huge amount of data.

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 may not have, but your phone really used that much data. There is an app or apps on it, possibly running in background, that sent or received that much data.