@Lawrence Finch

And, of course, your explanation clears up why this only happens on the iPhone and not on HTC or BlackBerry phones?  I think not!

You just proved it. Only happens on iPhones. So it's something on the iPhone that isn't on the HTC or BB. With 300,000 apps (compared to none for the HTC and a dozen for the BB) are you surprised? If it was an AT&T problem then all phones would be affected equally, don't you think?

Just chiming in---

1. This issue is an issue, is it not?

(Of course this issue needs to be clearly defined - it's not late night data usage or early morning--nothing to do with the "one-time" report AT&T receives from the iPhones)

2. The "issue" not the SYMPTOMS is a moving target. 

a)Which iPhone

b)Which iPhone OS

c)Which carrier?

What's reasonable?

Is it really reasonable for all the gimmicks, tricks, work-arounds that either AT&T, Apple or App makers to expect iPhone users to do?  SMARTPHONE ring-a-bell?

Yes, it's an issue, and a serious one for users on limited data plans. It's the subject of an FCC rulemaking in the USA as well as legal action. The issue is, as you point out, the fact that the iPhone sends or receives much more data than users expect or can predict. Not when it happens, or how it happens. (BTW, it is not a report that AT&T receives from the iPhone. AT&T does not get reports from the phone, it gets reports from its switches when the connection is closed. Switches force the connection to be closed once a day if it hasn't been closed earlier by opening a connection on another switch).

It happens with all models of iPhones, and all versions of iOS except 1.x. It was first reported in June, 2010, but that is probably because that's when unlimited plans started to be phased out. No one tracked their data usage before then.

It happens with many carriers, however, no one has tried to identify all of the carriers involved. The "nighttime" usage aspect is probably an artifact of which billing system the carrier uses; there are only a few producers of cellular billing systems in the world.

At least some of it is to be expected. If you use data-intensive apps you will use a lot of data. These include multiplayer games, audio and video streaming services, news apps that update in real time, social networking apps that update in near real time, etc. Facebook is a huge data hog if you set it to track everyone and everything.

Some of it is probably buggy apps that keep retrying sending data when a connection fails.

With a few carriers it is likely a true billing error; this appears to be especially common with international roaming.

(All of the above information has been gleaned from following the thread for 17 months; there's nothing that I claim is original except the observation that there are only a small number of billing system producers which I know because I work in the field.)

I was alerted to the higher than expected data usage when both me and my girlfriend changed our tariffs. in the UK the trend has gone from providing unlimited data to a couple of different limited options...so now it means you have to pay attention. So when she got told she had used 80% of her allowance we started to investigate and find all of the above.

There seems to be a few different theories and possibilities so I did my own tests, still in the middle of them but did this.

Downloaded DataMan Free version just to see the real time increase in usage.

Logged every 4 or 5 minutes the amount of data used. Now I was trying various things for the first hour so the data will be a little skewed but hopefully not massively.

First hours usage 3051 K

Then the changes

Switched off Siri - Virtually no impact

Switched off Location Services - Little/no impact

Switched of Diagnostic & Usage Reporting to Apple - Nothing yet but hoping it has an effect later

Switched off Mail Fetch/Push - IMPACT

Hour two showed no increase in data usage...Probably hear some of you shouting of course not you turned everything off lol.

I switched back on mail fetch and push set for every 15 minutes. 100K of use instantly, even though no messages were downloaded, and of course to some extent obvious.

I think this is just a case of management. So, I am going to slowly turn back on the various options, excluding Diagnostic & Usage reporting, and see what impact that has.

I think E-mail probably uses a lot more than we suspect and the Diagnostic & Usage Reporting certainly seems to send an unreasonable amount of data and at a time we would consider we are aren't using our phone, Apple are :-)

I'll update with the effect of the other services but it seems like it's just a case of sensible settings in a world where we get sent a lot more stuff electronically.

Thanks for the summary Mr. Finch.  I tried starting at the beginning on page 1 but gave up after page 5 and skipped to 98.  Seems like it's a little better understood but still not well enough...

Canada, UK, Norway and Hong Kong and I haven't tracked the carriers-- I think it would take a little time to discover them-- some are mentioned in this thread (oh gee-- how many pages?) 

Last summer UK users on holiday got surprises:

Another iPhone glitch: Holidaymakers hit with huge bills for surfing web abroad - even with internet switched OFF

Then, note an app maker's comment:

according to Kengwei, "Some apps can go on for 10 minutes before the iOS watchdog kills it. It depends on how an app is designed by the developers."

ref: iPhone Data Pains

Also, note from a forum comment about AT&T's billing process:

How a law firm tested "phantom" AT&T smartphone data use

the comment in the forum:

"As data travels between the UE (User Equipment--the phone) and the Internet it will pass through several different nodes, several (or all) of these nodes will generate CDRs (Charging Data Records). These CDRs will be compared against each other to make sure that everything is OK. Normal policy for operators is that if they detect something wrong with a CDR it (and possibly earlier and later CDRs) will be discarded. This means that the operator will lose money and the user will get some data usage for free, but the alternative is that the operator might charge for something the user hasn’t done, which is a big no-no (can turn ugly if brought to court)."

# # # # # #

Now--- does or has anyone had success in running a concurrent packet trace of an iPhone for both Cellular and WiFi usage?  IF so, how did you do it?

kramrolyat70 - That's an excellent procedure and I have done the same with mail push, which I haven't ever used, but was thinking it might solve some other problems for me.  I found it's not worth it, so email push is still off on my phone.

In addition to the kind of testing kramrolyat has done, it's worthwhile checking your data usage (via DataMan - I highly recommend the Pro version), opening a suspect app, closing app in a few minutes, and checking DataMan again.  I was able to rule out quite a few suspects that way.

If you have push off for apps like FaceBook, you aren't going to have a problem.  I check FaceBook several time a day on my phone, and even on cellular data, it doesn't use too much.  Google maps, OTOH, is a real hog, and I'm careful with it.

I don't think there's an app that will show you data usage by app.  I've looked and not found, but if you are willing to do a little testing, as described above, DataMan can give you the info you need.

BackPacker57 wrote:

 

Now--- does or has anyone had success in running a concurrent packet trace of an iPhone for both Cellular and WiFi usage?  IF so, how did you do it?

 

If you control the router it would not be difficult, but COULD be expensive. You'd need a packet monitor such as WireShark, which is an expensive product (except for the free PC version that only monitors that specific PC).

One thing I didn't mention is that most users are not aware that the iPhone turns off WiFi when the phone is asleep to extend battery life. While WiFi uses less power than cellular, it uses it continuously, while cellular only uses power when actually transmitting. So, if your phone is asleep it will not use WiFi for data even if you are within range of a WiFi hotspot.

The reason I mention simultaneous is security.

Knowing that my iPhone was spoofed at one point-- I'd like to be able to capture both/simultaneously--- JUST IN CASE. (Any security compromise)

I have a mirror setup in the router with a laptop with WireShark running on it.  What about the packet data monitoring of Cellular data?

You cannot monitor cellular data packets in flight as they are encrypted. And the "sandbox" model of iPhone apps prevents an app from going deep enough into the OS to monitor at the packet level without jailbreaking the phone.

Morning..after receiving my "you have now used 65% of your data" email yesterday I came searching and found this thread.  In the 18 months of owning the iPhone I have never even come close to my 200mb until this week.  I have started reading at page one from last year and now on this last page of 98.  Thank you all for the suggestions, which I have been doing, one by one to try and correct the issue.

I put the Dataman Pro app on my phone, shut down all notifications, turned off cellular data, my 3G network and I am working on the Wifi from home.  I have checked all my apps, which gave me a great opportunity to dump the ones I no longer use, and have gone into my settings and turned off the imessage (had no idea it was hogging data).  After shutting off, turning off, disabling what I thought was "IT", I just checked the Dataman and my iPhone is still hogging the Wifi to the tune of 19.1mb since midnight.  I even shut down the "find my iPhone" app to see if that was it.  It seems the more things I shut down, the higher the usage. 

Whatever or whomever is "phoning home"   seems to be doing it every 10 minutes or so.  I do not have email pushing, I get all that through my laptop so it's not an issue.  Also at 6am my battery was at 100%, by 7am with no phone calls, no texting..nothing, my battery was down to 89%. 

Is is possible to uninstall the iOS5?  On my phone at least, that seems to be when my issues started.

Thanks for the help you all gave, I really appreciate it.

Not going to jailbreak path-- although I read someone did and did some sniffing.

Jailbreak gives an easy out to all concerned to fault the holder of the Jailbroken iPhone.

For entertainment purposes:

British iPhone plots his Apple iPhone data usage

That is what carriers dream about--- cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.

alik57 wrote:

 

Is is possible to uninstall the iOS5?  On my phone at least, that seems to be when my issues started.

 

Turn off the Diagnostics and Usage setting to see if that makes a difference.  It appears to have helped on my wife's iPhone 4 with iOS 5.0.1.

Settings>General>About>Diagnostics & Usage>Don't Send

@DUTCH, thank you for your suggestion but that was never turned on.  I only have 6 more days on this billing cycle to watch that I don't go over and then I'll reset it all and watch for the "alarms" from Dataman to start going off.  I just don't get it all.  Nothing has changed on my iPhone from last month when I used 21mb of data all month to this month where I am in the process of going over.  Only thing that is different...I downloaded the update.

Ali