Q: Unknown data usage early morning

I have been trying to figure out this issue since yesterday afternoon and it gets increasingly bizarre and frustrating the more research and inquiring I do.

My wife and I have had our new iPhones for just under a month with the 200MB plan, and when I suddenly got a 90% warning despite almost always being on wifi, I looked at my usage and just like everyone else saw the regular 2AM data usages that together accounted for a huge chunk of my overall "usage".

AT&T support and Apple support, on the phone, seem completely clueless. To AT&T's credit they did give me a free upgrade to the 2GB plan for this month (basically, they credited my account $10) and the guy was really nice, but no one can tell me what's going on.

I did determine that when the iPhone sleeps, it does drop the WiFi, and that would explain why these mysterious 2am transfers are not going over WiFi and thus impacting the data usage. It doesn't explain what these transfers are and no one will tell me.

What I find utterly bizarre is that these data transfers are clearly, demonstrably, unequivocally counting towards data usage, putting people over their limits, and costing people money. Yet when AT&T says that they don't count towards data limits, Gizmodo and the NY Times just uncritically accept it despite such evidence, and there is no follow up whatsoever.

I realize that the tiered plans are relatively new, and that a lot of folks are grandfathered into unlimited plans, so the impact my not be as widespread as it could be. But this seems like a MAJOR consumer issue that is being met with a dismissive shrug by not only AT&T but journalists that should seemingly be a lot more skeptical.

In the meantime, I'm going to turn airplane mode on overnight to avoid these charges, which is easy enough. It seems to have solved it last night, at least. And I guess I can keep doing that forever, if need be...

But is it asking too much for AT&T/Apple to acknowledge that folks need to do this to avoid overnight charges, or, at least, for journalists to be asking the most simple of questions about this issue that is costing, or will cost, tons of people money? Why is this such a Kafkaesque situation?

twostepsforward wrote:
In the meantime, I'm going to turn airplane mode on overnight to avoid these charges, which is easy enough. It seems to have solved it last night, at least. And I guess I can keep doing that forever, if need be...

I tried that. What happens is the large data transfer then occurs a minute or so after I turn airplane mode off. So doing this just defers the transfer, it doesn't eliminate it.

Can you confirm if the WiFi is active at the time when these transfers are theoretically occuring after you turn off Airplane mode?

If the transfers are going over 3G overnight because WiFi is sleep-disabled, then theoretically if you turn off Airplane mode in the morning, the transfers should go over WiFi since the iPhone would not then be asleep?

The real questions we should all be asking iare:

What is in the data?
Where is it going?
Who is it going to?

And last... Why?

Yes, WiFi is active. One of the many explanations is that the item on the bill is not indicative of a data transfer at the time reported; it is actually a consolidation of data transfers for a longer period of time ending at the time reported on the bill.

I can buy this if AT&T would explain it that way, and WHY it doesn't occur unless the phone is online.

For a summary of the issue take a look at my post in this thread dated:

Aug 6, 2010 10:40 AM

Mystery Solved!
When you access any of the "applications" (yes, Contacts List is an application), you press your Home button to Exit the Application. However, it does not Close the Application. It is basically still running.
How do I Close those Applicaitions, you ask? After you Exit the Application, "double tap" the Home button, which shows all Applications that are still running at the bottom of your screen. Press and hold any one of the Applications and they begin to wiggle with a red hyphen. Tap the red hyphen, which is a little tricky, and that Closes the Application. So, right after you use any Application, be sure and follow the steps to Close the Applications.
I think I spent two weeks and many hours before I finally talked to an Apple Specialist that knew what I was talking about. Hope this helps.

What the &@&%}^>£ does that have to do with large unexplained billable data transfers in the early morning containing no one knows what data, going who knows where for who knows what to who knows whom??

Except according to Apple, it is a special kind of multi-tasking. Those applications showing after a double-click of the home button are in a frozen state so that you can tap them and resume where you left off. But from what I read they are not 'running' or in progress. If you open all of your applications they will all be there but they will not be using up system memory.

This explanation defies logic. Either the data transfer is taking place or it is not. One cannot surf the web now and transfer the data later. The surfing is the data. And if it were just a report of data used it woudl be a small index with time, in or out, and a quantity with a total at the end. Nothing nore.

It is not the OS unless it is common to all iOSs. It si an issue AT&T is aware of and is obviously ignoring for a reason.

brm123 wrote:
This explanation defies logic. Either the data transfer is taking place or it is not. One cannot surf the web now and transfer the data later. The surfing is the data. And if it were just a report of data used it woudl be a small index with time, in or out, and a quantity with a total at the end. Nothing nore.

No, it does not defy logic, it is quite logical. IT ISN'T A DATA TRANSFER AT ALL. IT IS A SUMMARY REPORT OF DATA TRANSFERRED IN THE PAST. The data transfer is NOT actually taking place, it only appears on the bill at a specified time. At least, that's one hypothesis. The explanation is that when the iPhone was first released every tiny data transfer appeared on the bill, resulting in bills of hundreds of pages. Now you just get a few, larger, transfers on your bill. So the billing system is clearly summing up usage over time and reporting it as one number, or a few. This would make total sense if the "transfer" at 2 AM always appeared, whether the phone was on or off. But it only appears when the phone is on. There has been no good explanation of why. I can speculate, but I won't because I want AT&T to explain it.

The real test of this is to note accumulated data on the phone before 2 AM, and check it again say, after 4 AM. I don't think anyone has done this yet, but I will try.

Okay, say it is a "suumary". Two problems:

1) The customer is being charged for the data twice. Once when used and again when the summary is sent. If this is a billing summary for the benefit of AT&T why should the customer be charged for it?

2) The size of the files is too large. I filled a standard letter size document with random text. font size 10 no spaces, no paragraphs. 10 pages saved to a text file took 42.5 kilobytes. Multiply that by 100 and assume no compression is used and a 1000 pages would only take 4.25 megs. The transfers in questions are in the tens of megs. Not logical at all to me.

brm123 wrote:
Okay, say it is a "suumary". Two problems:

1) The customer is being charged for the data twice. Once when used and again when the summary is sent. If this is a billing summary for the benefit of AT&T why should the customer be charged for it?

Really, When was it charged the first time? Suppose the overnight value is just the accumulated usage from the time of the previous entry on the bill. I have several entries a day on my bill. I HAVE checked my usage as recorded on the phone vs what appears on my bill, and they are the same, within rounding error.

2) The size of the files is too large. I filled a standard letter size document with random text. font size 10 no spaces, no paragraphs. 10 pages saved to a text file took 42.5 kilobytes. Multiply that by 100 and assume no compression is used and a 1000 pages would only take 4.25 megs. The transfers in questions are in the tens of megs. Not logical at all to me.

It's not one file. It is hundreds of small transfers, that are summed by the billing system and reported at one time. Your example is only meaningful if you never use maps, never use stocks, or weather, or surf the Internet. And email is not text files; most email today is essentially web pages, which can be hundreds of KB each.

Now if I only believed this myself...

brm123 wrote:
Okay, say it is a "suumary". Two problems:

1) The customer is being charged for the data twice. Once when used and again when the summary is sent. If this is a billing summary for the benefit of AT&T why should the customer be charged for it? _Really, When was it charged the first time? Suppose the overnight value is just the accumulated usage from the time of the previous entry on the bill. I have several entries a day on my bill. I HAVE checked my usage as recorded on the phone vs what appears on my bill, and they are the same, within rounding error._

Point taken.

2) The size of the files is too large. I filled a standard letter size document with random text. font size 10 no spaces, no paragraphs. 10 pages saved to a text file took 42.5 kilobytes. Multiply that by 100 and assume no compression is used and a 1000 pages would only take 4.25 megs. The transfers in questions are in the tens of megs. Not logical at all to me._It's not one file. It is hundreds of small transfers, that are summed by the billing system and reported at one time. Your example is only meaningful if you never use maps, never use stocks, or weather, or surf the Internet. And email is not text files; most email today is essentially web pages, which can be hundreds of KB each._

No it is not "the actual data file" we agreed the transfer was a "summary of the data used". A numerical representation for billing purposes of the quantity of data transferred not the actual data. The size of the actual file whether text, email, maps, web pages has no significant relationship to the size of the summary file. It should not take a large megs of data to say on one line of the summary "a map file of ten megs was downloaded" or "an email of 1 meg was downloaded." And that is essentially what the summary would be. A text file with a *numerical representation* of: how much was sent, which way did it go and when. No way the file should be in the ten megabyte range.

brm123 wrote:
2) The size of the files is too large. I filled a standard letter size document with random text. font size 10 no spaces, no paragraphs. 10 pages saved to a text file took 42.5 kilobytes. Multiply that by 100 and assume no compression is used and a 1000 pages would only take 4.25 megs. The transfers in questions are in the tens of megs. Not logical at all to me._It's not one file. It is hundreds of small transfers, that are summed by the billing system and reported at one time. Your example is only meaningful if you never use maps, never use stocks, or weather, or surf the Internet. And email is not text files; most email today is essentially web pages, which can be hundreds of KB each._

No it is not "the actual data file" we agreed the transfer was a "summary of the data used". A numerical representation for billing purposes of the quantity of data transferred not the actual data. The size of the actual file whether text, email, maps, web pages has no significant relationship to the size of the summary file. It should not take a large megs of data to say on one line of the summary "a map file of ten megs was downloaded" or "an email of 1 meg was downloaded." And that is essentially what the summary would be. A text file with a *numerical representation* of: how much was sent, which way did it go and when. No way the file should be in the ten megabyte range.

I guess I wasn't clear. It is NOT a summary file. NO data was transferred at 2 AM. The billing system aggregates all of the data since the last line item on the bill and posts it to your account at 2 AM. Zero data was transfered at 2 AM. At least that's my current hypothesis. I'll test it tonight by comparing my usage data before and after 2 AM. But I still can't explain why it doesn't appear if the phone is in airplane mode...

BTW, I don't mean to be argumentative; I've just been following this thread for 3 months, and I've seen and dismissed most of the explanations and all of the ones from AT&T (they have several). I still don't have a real explanation. But I'm trying this one on for size.

For me the transfers agree with the usage total on my phone, but I know people who report that the total data on their bill is much higher than the usage reported on the phone. But most of these users are not in the US.

If it were a consolidation of the usage it seems to me it would occur at or near the same time every day and only once a day.