Q: Unknown data usage early morning

I was suspicious of AT&T data usage billing for sometime and today I have a proof that they inflate data usage by a huge margin (like 3000%). I have captured a screen shot from the AT&T data usage report that shows that I used 106MB of data in two minutes on 9/26/12 between 5:54PM and 5:56 PM. At that time I was driving back from my office and listening to a radio that has a max bitrate of 128kb/sec. I plugged in these numbers to compute the maximum data consumed for 2 minutes should not be more than 2MB (e.g., 128000 [128kb/sec rate] * 60*2 [2 min] / 8 [bits] ~ 2MB).

What a scam! I'm furious.

Interesting, but it proves nothing, because the time stamps on your screenshot are the time the usage was reported to the billing system by different cellular network switches. It could have happened any time in the previous 24 hours.

What would be meaningful would be the usage as reported on the phone for the time you were driving. Settings/general/Usage - Cellular Usage. If you reset usage at the start of your billing cycle and track it against the online display or your bill then you can see if AT&T is overbilling you or not. It's only the total that is meaningful.

There was a bug in Verizon iPhone 5s and Verizon issued a fix so that you would not use cellular data while on WiFi, for more info see:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/19843215#19843215

I have a similar problem: IPhone 4S (upgraded to IOS 6 OTA) connects to cellular data while sleeping/locked. I have an Airport base station the phone connects to when awake, but at night it's using cellular data.

My second iPhone 4S upgraded to IOS 6 using iTunes shows no problem.

Ok guys, I'd like to post an upgrade of my situation, cause MAYBE I resolved it. It's not easy and it comes with a little pain, but after two months of 2/3 gb of phantom sent data, it's almost a week that things are gone back to normality.

I'm in Italy, i've two Iphone 4 and my wife's one started experiencing huge data sent traffic in July: in a month her Iphone sent more than 3 Gb of traffic while usually (for almost two years) it was less than 300 Mb; I tired at first upgrading to 5.1, then recovery from backup, than disabling Ping and other stuff like notification, crash reports and so on. Nothing. powering off the Iphone during night helped to have a little lass data sent, but not so much.

Than after IOS 6 upgrade was released i decided to rebuild my wife Iphone from scratch. First of all I saved all the stuff (pictures, contacts and so on), I noticed there was a lot of space tagged as "other" (yellow on the space tray) than i upgraded the phone as a new phone and made this two things:

• create a new apple ID for my wife Iphone only (we used to share the same to have the same apps on all the Iphones);
• deactivate the family share;

It's not science, I didn't take notes of all the things done, maybe it's just familiy share and it's not necessary to create a new Apple ID. Further I'll upgrade the new Ipad and i'll link it to this new Apple ID also and keep you informed.

Ciao

All iPhones on every version of iOS have always disconnected from WiFi when locked, unless connected to power. If a data connection is needed while locked all iPhones have always used cellular data. This is nothing new.

Lawrence, you are wrong. That is why Apple just pushed an update for iPhone 5 on Verizon. This is a new behavior introduced by IOS 6. You add nothing but misinformation to this thread.

Lawrence,

Here are Apple' notes for the iPhone 5 update (4s has same issue introduced by IOS 6):

"This carrier settings update resolves an issue in which, under certain circumstances, iPhone 5 may use Verizon cellular data while the phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network. "

Now the question is when will the rest of us get an update?

I am not wrong. The iPhone has always turned off WiFi when the phone is asleep to preserve battery, unless it is plugged in. If you go back and read this thread (and other threads going back 5 years) you will find many discussions on this subject. The fix that was pushed yesterday was NOT from Apple, it was from Verizon, and it fixed a DIFFERENT problem of the iPhone using cellular data when the phone was not asleep and was connected to WiFi.

Lawrence is 100% correct. A few minutes with Google will show you that the iPhone switches WiFi off when sleeping and not plugged in, and has done so for years. The Verizon patch resolves an issue where Cellular Data was being used when the user was actually doing things on their phone and connected to WiFi.

Here is another data leak that while small on a daily basis, can add megabytes to your monthly usage and that could be enough to break your data plan cap.  The problem is Apple Push Notifications (APN).  It is well documented from Apple that APNs will ALWAYS use cellular over Wifi if cellular is available.  The ONLY ways to stop this behavior is to shut off the cellular side of the iphone or turn off push notifications.  DataMan Pro (I am a longtime user) showed that it was push notifications that were leaking data every hour by the same amount that ATT was showing in their usage records.

This is a legitimate data usage as it is an app on the iphone that is using the data, even though it is an app that we don't think about.  Why Apple chose to prioritize cellular over WiFi for this particular feature is unknown, but we need to PUSH on Apple to reverse the priority. 

With capped data plans quickly becoming the norm, we need to track down and kill every data leak we can if expect to not be surprised!

David T.

drtidmore wrote:

  Why Apple chose to prioritize cellular over WiFi for this particular feature is unknown, but we need to PUSH on Apple to reverse the priority.

 

Why Apple chose to use cellular for Push notifications is well known, at least to people who understand the technology. Only cellular has the technical capability of pushing data. You cannot push over a WiFi connection, unless there is a process waiting for the data on the phone, running continuously (polling). Which would run down the battery in a few hours. Cellular data is capable of generating a "signal" that will wake up a sleeping process on the phone. Apple did it the only way that will work. However, the push signal just wakes up a process, the process then launches the app, and the app retrieves the data.

The amount of data transmitted by the Push notification itself is unmeasurable, a few bytes. If the phone is asleep when the push notification is received the app that retrieves the data will use cellular data rather than WiFi, for the reason repeated ad nauseam in this thread; WiFi is turned off to preserve battery when the phone is asleep. Some apps have a setting that disables Push data retrieval on Cellular data. That's up to the app programmer.

That is all fine and good, but after waking up the process to handle the push notification, when the phone is plugged in and has WiFi available, why not select WiFi over cellular, even if the iphone is in a locked state (such as overnight)? 

It should use WiFi to retrieve data if there is a current WiFi connection.