Constantly connecting to internet by itself

I'm going to guess that you have email set to check every 15 minutes.

Same problem here with both my 3GS and the wife's. Never paid much attention to the usage stats until I got a note from AT&T saying my wife's phone was getting close to the 200mb monthly limit. Checked my account and found that on several occasions over the course of a week, "Phone" (number not listed) was sending huge chunks of data out during the day but predominantly during the 0100 through 0300 hours of the day. There were 3 such transmissions on her phone, 48mb, 24mb, and 14mb within 30 hours on the 20th & 21st of this month. A bunch of other smaller transmissions in the 2 to 7mb range were also noted. Called AT&T and talked to a Customer Service Rep and then to a "Technician" but neither had a clue. "Updating the APPS" was the first suggestion but this was shot down immediately because we have WiFi on 24/7 and can access it from everywhere on the property.

As with "mlgw", powering down the phones at night solves the problem temporarily.

JES42 wrote:
Same problem here with both my 3GS and the wife's. Never paid much attention to the usage stats until I got a note from AT&T saying my wife's phone was getting close to the 200mb monthly limit. Checked my account and found that on several occasions over the course of a week, "Phone" (number not listed) was sending huge chunks of data out during the day but predominantly during the 0100 through 0300 hours of the day. There were 3 such transmissions on her phone, 48mb, 24mb, and 14mb within 30 hours on the 20th & 21st of this month. A bunch of other smaller transmissions in the 2 to 7mb range were also noted. Called AT&T and talked to a Customer Service Rep and then to a "Technician" but neither had a clue. "Updating the APPS" was the first suggestion but this was shot down immediately because we have WiFi on 24/7 and can access it from everywhere on the property.

As with "mlgw", powering down the phones at night solves the problem temporarily.

If you won't mind, I would like to see the real size numbers from that "Phone" you saw in your bill/statement. I have seen them but never that big. I think you are miscalculating KB for MB.

Also note since 2008 the phone does send back data to apple (geolocation and statistics with no personal info) and it does this periodically. That is what I have always assumed the KB transmissions were at various hours when I know our phones were doing nothing.

EDIT:
Neither of our phones use push notification, location services are turned off, etc. Nothing running in the background. Both were updated to iOS4.1 the day it was released.

As requested:

09/20 04:09 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 13441KB
09/20 01:35 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 24424KB
09/20 12:07 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 4887KB
09/20 02:04 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 28070KB
09/15 08:26 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 4871KB
09/15 02:01 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 23737KB
09/14 07:33 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 19284KB
09/14 06:05 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 1402KB
09/14 02:37 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 11316KB

Yup they are large. Just checking.
I also wonder since I do use data off and on all day, I never see the usage listed each time I use it so I wonder if they at intervals sum up what was used since last sum up and post a single line for hours worth of data.

Though doesn't explain middle of the night of no use since last sum up if that is the case.

Go into your account and check it there. Those figures were from the "Data Usage" section and were from the wife's phone. The figures on my account weren't nearly as large. As I said above, the AT&T folks were stumped. I can see someone jumping on an unprotected WiFi and using it but on a cellphone number? The other thing I neglected to mention was that with the exception of two of those days, I was in Pittsburgh and the wife had come back home following a funeral, some 240 miles away! I used to work for the NSA, maybe it is them getting back at me for walking off with 32 years worth of pens, pencils, and paper clips!!

I too have seen the same items in our statement. However I really only focused on mine and saw all mine in the 8KB like range plus or minus a few.

Just reviewed my wifes and see the 22MB type ones as well.

Since unlimited data don't fully care, but am curious. I am also on the original (2G) phone and thus not on the 4.x iOS since not available for my phone. She has 3G and latest OS. However I see mine sending more frequently than hers. Even if I sum mine up though mine doesn't send as much data as hers. But then again, I have old 2G with not GPS thus not sure if Apple is collecting any GPS data from 2G phones since inaccurate with the tower stuff.

Even so, 20+MB of GPS data does seem like a lot but then again, I do wardriving for work and we do get some pretty large GPS files uncompressed.

This afternoon I spent about 20 minutes talking to an Apple service rep (Suzanne) and, at the end of the day, she still could not explain the random sending of huge chunks of data at various times during the day. When she realized it was something that unlimited data plan users hadn't had to worry about, she did say she would be checking her account to see if it was happening to her's.

After that it was an hour and 20 minutes on with AT&T, first a service rep, then a technician, and finally a front line manager. Same result, no one had a clue as to the cause nor where to begin looking for the problem. It took a while for me to convince them that it was not the phone "reporting in" to Apple, not with multi-megabit files (see above listing) and a lot of them in the middle of the night. AT&T did notate my account with all the information passed on so when I call them back next week after the new billing period starts, they will have a reference to go by.

UPDATE
Just spent an hour on the phone with an Apple rep (Rasheed) and an AT&T Product Management person (James) and may have gotten to the bottom of the mysterious data usage.

Periodically AT&T's servers will poll each and every phone, updating information within the system. Under normal circumstances, these data transfers can be of varying sizes, from small to very large (see my info above). These data transfers are NOT supposed to charged against the phone owner's monthly data plan nor subtracted from it. In my case, and it looks like a few others, this is in fact happening. We went through the whole "still connected to an internet portal" after accessing and downloading data but, at the end of the day, pointing out that some of the biggest transfers took place in the wee small hours of the morning, James dug a little deeper. He has written up a ticket to have the problem researched and corrected within the next couple of days.

This problem has probably been happening for quite a long time but only came to the forefront in my case when I got off of the unlimited data plan and dropped to the 200mb plan and added a second phone for the wife also on the smaller plan. Most people with an unlimited plan couldn't really be bothered to check their usage because it wasn't going to cost them anything. However, when a lot of 200mb plans came online, folks are more likely to pay closer attention because their wallets were going to be affected should they run over. Rasheed at Apple said that he had heard a little about this problem but hadn't had the chance to look into it until tonight but could confirm that more people on the 200mb plan were calling about it.

Should the problem be identified within the AT&T servers, then the data usage will be erased once a fix is put in place. Hopefully this is the first step in resolving this issue for all of us.

AT&T called me again this morning to discuss it, they had just gotten the trouble ticket. They are going to assign it to the Network Engineers and have them take a close look at the server software in the area of data usage billing. We both suspect there is an error in the coding that was overlooked during testing and an update. We shall see and I'll keep updating this thread until I'm sure the problem has gone away.

Any update on this issue. I just got slammed with an overage charge this weekend on my son's 3GS. We got the 65% notice Friday evening and by Saturday morning we got the 90% notice (or 95 whatever it is) even though the phone was connected to Wifi the entire time. I got the overage notice Sunday afternoon but by then we'd done a factory reset on the phone and set it up as new (not restored from a backup). Conveniently AT&T had an outage yesterday that prevented me from checking the data usage.

There is a serious problem with these giant celluar data transfers even when the phones are connected to Wifi.

Below is the most recent activity. The phone was reset on the afternoon of the 17th but by then I think it was too late.

10/17 08:29 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 35KB
10/17 06:24 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 125KB
10/17 04:56 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 13KB
10/17 02:35 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 103KB
10/17 02:13 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 85KB
10/17 02:07 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 28KB
10/16 04:39 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 11556KB
10/16 03:06 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 13184KB
10/16 10:57 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 54KB
10/16 10:52 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 9KB
10/15 11:59 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 660KB
10/15 04:59 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 14215KB
10/15 03:23 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 2434KB
10/14 08:26 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 329KB
10/14 07:08 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 289KB
10/14 03:23 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 18386KB

<Edited by Host>