Q: Unknown data usage early morning

Email accounts can use a lot of data, especially IMAP, iCloud and Exchange. Exchange in particular uses Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol, which has huge overhead. But all of these need to keep your local mailboxes in sync with the server, and if you have a large number of messages in your mailboxes (I currently have 800 in my Exchange inbox) that sync can use a lot of data. On top of that most IMAP and Exchange servers are "modern" and fully support HTML, which is also has very high overhead. A text message of 1K, for example, can grow to 10K if sent as HTML, and up to several MB if it has attachments and/or graphics in it.

Exchange also syncs calendars and contacts, so any time you update a contact or calendar item those need to be resynced.

And in addition to the normal data, if the connection is interrupted it has to send everything all over again.

Yes, loving this feature. According to DMP, the largest amount of 3G data transfer is iCloud. And I have the option to transfer over cellular turned off for Documents & Data, so I have no clue why it's still transferring data.

It is syncing email, contacts and calendar. that is always on, as it is for any IMAP or Exchange email account.

I don't use iCloud for mail, contacts, or calendars. I do all that via Gmail. Unless you're saying that IMAP/Exchange activity will be reported as iCloud? That seems strange.

No, IMAP and Exchange are not reported as iCloud. But if you have a .me email account it will sync whether you use it or not. How much data are you seeing with iCloud?

Alright, so this was super frustrating to me - as I just signed up with AT&T and had t-mobile on edge data before. I have a factory unlocked 4Gs. I reset my stats on May 1st. In a year, somehow I only transferred 484 mb or something on TMobile, and in 11 days on AT&T, I'd SENT 3.9GB. Absurd.

What I've seemed to have found is that the culprit was somehow iCloud. I was out of space, and there was an additional 500mb required to back up - and it seemed to be continually sending stuff - it hasn't completely gone away according to my bill - but as of right now, it's only sent 5mb since 11am today.

What I did was, due to my iCloud space being insufficient, I upgraded my space to 10GB, backed everything up using wifi, turned all the doc and data stuff off that was listed earlier in this thread and once everything was backed up, left iCloud to it's own devices - on Friday, prior to doing this, in 11 min (between 629-640) my SENT data went from 3.6-3.9GB. After doing this, my data stayed at 3.9 all weekend, and I just reset it today. Seems like Apple has some iCloud issues....

Hope this helps.

It varies. About 2 MBs a day, probably. Doesn't seem like much, but that's almost 1/3 of my quota!

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.

MichaelBlight wrote:

 

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.

 

How do you know it's always connect to WiFi? Do you know that WiFi is turned off when the phone is asleep (that is, the screen is dark), unless the phone is connected to power?

asfdj wrote:

 

I have identified my issue. I don't have a resolution yet, but I'm very confident that I've isolated the cause of the massive discrepancy between what my iPhone reports for Cellular Data Usage and what AT&T reports.

 

Adding fuel to the Microcell fire.  I ran an experiment - 4 days with Microcell on and 4 days with the Microcell off. Here are the results:

MICROCELL ON (MAY 8-12)

                      iPhone    

                      Cellular    

                      Data

                      Usage        AT&T          % Difference

                      _______    _______      -------------------

iPhone 4S       87.5MB      453.1MB           417%

iPhone 4         59.8MB      100.6MB             68%

iPhone 4          7.9MB          5.7MB         (27.3)% *my son's phone, not at home

iPhone 4S       51.9MB      141.5MB            172%

iPhone 3G       12.9MB       50.7B               292%

MICROCELL OFF (MAY 12-16)

                      iPhone    

                      Cellular    

                      Data

                      Usage        AT&T          % Difference

                      _______    _______      -------------------

iPhone 4S       152.8MB    136.2MB           (10.8)%

iPhone 4             48MB       44.0MB               (8)%

iPhone 4          23.6MB       24.5MB               3.8% *my son's phone, not at home

iPhone 4S        46.9MB       52.1MB             11.1%

iPhone 3G        21.8MB       23.1MB               6.0%

As you can see the delta between the iPhone and AT&T is minimal, likely due to variabilitiy in when usage data is uploaded to AT&T.  Also note the usage for 4 days is quite consistent for 4 days, so not a variation in usage patterns.

So does this make you as mad as much as it does me?  To have AT&T continually deny there is an issue, and force customers to upgrade to higher and higher data plans is beyond unacceptable, it is bordering on justification for a class action lawsuit.  If it weren't for all the people in this thread willing to take the time to perform such tests and publish results this would go on in perpetuity. 

AT&T - ARE YOU LISTENING????  FIX THIS OR GIVE CREDITS TO ALL CUSTOMERS WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED EXPONENTIAL DATA USAGE GROWTH SINCE 5.1 and iPhone 4S. $1,000 would be acceptable given the pain and burden you have created for your loyal customers. 

If any of you have the patience to speak with AT&T, please direct them to this thread and ask them to respond here.  We'd all love to hear from them. 

@jbeir Your 4S numbers are like mine. It took 6 weeks of dismissive, highly scripted and erroneous responses before I finally reached someone at AT&T who understood what I was saying and opened a second case. Shortly afterwards, I received word that there was a provisioning problem found and that it should be fixed.

It isn't.

I reported back with new screenshots, and since then, it's been a wall of silence.

I've now unplugged the M-Cell permanently. Dropped calls are now the norm around here, but at least I'm seeing accurate data numbers.

If you can't accurately, within a reasonable range, measure a customer's data usage, then you shouldn't be making decisions (throttling, capping, billing) based on those numbers. It's that simple. I wouldn't stand for it from the electric or water company, I don't see why data is any different. If you're going to bill based on numbers you're collecting, they'd better be right or you're essentially committing fraud.

At some point, I may reconnect the M-Cell and try some packet capture on its ethernet port to see what's flowing and where it's going. But investing hours of my time to troubleshoot an AT&T problem doesn't seem reasonable. What a frustrating experience.

I'm seeing this exact same thing with DataMan. I had my phone connected to power all last night and still had data usage. Most of it was iCloud related. And I have nothing turned on there except Find My Phone.

MichaelBlight wrote:

 

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.

 

Everyone, check out David Pogue's story on "How to Track your Smartphone Usage"

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/how-to-track-your-smartphone-data-usag e/?ref=personaltechemail&nl=technology&emc=edit_ct_20120517

Post to the discussion there to encourage David to dig into this issue.

Have you considered that since the Mcell device works like a cell of its own, your neighbors may be connecting to it?  Does it have built in security like a router?

You have to register each phone with the Microcell, so no risk of others hopping on.