The iPhone 5 uses Cellular Data over WiFi?

I wish....but just signed Three two-year contracts in January.😢

If ATT cannot provide a fix for the problem, it seems to me that you would have a good argument for them to let you out of the contracts without any penalty.

bondgrl63, excellent post, well said but I truly wish you would stick with us and insist Apple / AT&T address the real problem. There are enough people willing to put up with the nonsense or who don't understand for them to take the lazy route. If you have 3 iphones on your account and having used iphones for years you must have wanted this product. While it may be time consuming to keep pushing the issue I feel it's the only way we are going to get anything done. Thanks for listening, regardless.

I had a strange month of high data usage last winter, went over my 300 MB, then fiddled with the Settings, and the problem ended. AT&T refunded the added cost.

I haven't updated to OS7 yet. Traded in my 4S for a 5 last month and (like so many here) immediately saw a massive data spike. Never went over 250MB/month before, then went over 2 G!! No help from AT&T other than to say that the phone will use the cellular network before the wifi even when connected. I noticed that a bit withthe 4S but just turned off cellular at night and reduced the number of notifications. This is ridiculous tho. I would move to Verizon but just signed a 2-year contract last month.😠

I hope the watching the data on OS7 will help.

Well, it looks like iOS 7 did result in a solution for me, sort of. My daughter's iPhone 4S was reaching her 300 MB limit after only a few days of the start of a new billing period (I have AT&T Smart Limits on her line so she can't exceed the 300 MB during any one billing period). The iPhone should always use WiFi before Cellular, if available. But iOS 7 , in the SETTINGS section, has the ability to display the Cellular usage of each app. It turns out that the Youtube app was switching to cellular at home for no reason and at staying on cellular. It sucked up 28 MB of celluar data in a few minutes. I went in to CELLULAR settings section and switched YouTube off of cellular permanently. It has been three days now and her cellular data usage reading has only inched up a few hundred KB (mainly from emails). Hope this info helps others out there.

Did AT&T explain why they were willing to refund?

Like so many on this forum, I just upgraded from an iPhone 4 to the new 5s and in ONE DAY I have used about 1/4 of my monthly data. Usually I only use 1/4 of my data plan in ONE MONTH! I just turned off my LTE in the settings to see if this solves the problem. If not, I am going to greatly regret getting the new 5s, because I will not be able to afford the ridiculous data plan. Either that or just turn off data altogether.

I noticed that this forum started over a year ago. Has Apple acknowledged this as a defect? Has there been any efforts to solve this problem over the past year?

I had high data usage last February and had to buy another 300 MB to get through the month. I complained and AT&T refunded the extra cost. I turned off Cellular Data and LTE for a week or so, using them only when needed. After that I turned them back on and have not had high data usage again.

I did not do anything different to cause the high data usage, and I am not doing anything to prevent it, either. It just happened briefly and never again. I don't know why it happened, or whose fault it was, whether mine or AT&T's or Apple's.

I think the customer service rep at AT&T refunded the charge for the additional 300 MB out of goodwill to an old customer.

I said the high useage was due to some kind of problem because I was almost always on WiFi, had done nothing different from any other month in the past, and 300 MB had always been enough.

By calling AT&T, I had implied they had something to do with the problem. The rep asked about my Settings, so she implied I might have had something to do with the problem. But she said I had been an AT&T wireless customer for over ten years and they would reimburse me.

I just got a iphone5s from Tmobile. And I noticed that the phone uses LTE over Wifi, but use wifi over tmobile 4G. Then I found this post. The post has been so long that I couldn't go through everything. But I see your link about turning off LTE trying to prevent the iphone5s from using cellular over wifi. So is this a confirmed issue for iphone 5s? is there any link for it? Is this true for all carriers? My current feeling is that the software is programmed this way.

I saw people talking about turning off cellular for certain apps in iOS7. But this is NOT a fix. You still have to constantly turn things on and off, or you lose some capability. And I could turn off LTE to have wifi over cellular, but this basically makes my phone and service less valuable. The phone should be programmed to use wifi over any cellular data connection at any time! I am going to call Tmobile customer service to see if they have a patch for this.

I have an iPhone 5 and I used to have the same problem. My phone just would NOT want to stay connected to some wifi connections, and I would have to keep reconnecting to the wifi. But when I upgraded to iOS 7, that fixed the problem and the wifi is awesome now. It never goes off by itself and actually connects to the networks I had a problem with before by itself. So if you're not upgraded to the latest software, I would recommend it because it helped my problem.

*update to my last post above* - Well, now that I have turned off the LTE on my phone for the last couple of days, data usage has seemed to go back to normal. It really doesn't bother me. Honestly, I only noticed it being slightly faster on LTE compared to 3G. Kinda ***** for Apple and their credibility that this has been a problem for over a year and they still haven't fixed it, but oh well, 3G suits me fine, and at least they have an option built into the phone to turn off the LTE.

iOS7 fixed my problem. Probably will never know what was really going on in iOS6 for me.... My problem wasn't that it wouldn't use WiFi when it was available--it was it would burn through data periodically with no indications of which app was using the data. The dataman app showed the usage as system services so something in iOS run amok.

Best thing about iOS7 is you can see cellular data used by App: Settings->Cellular then scroll to the bottom to see usage by app and also be able to turn off Applications' access to use cellular data. This gives you a great tool for at least determining which apps (or system services) are using your cellular data.

With as many people as have had problems over a long period of time there are no doubt many root causes of the problems so no one quick one size fits all solution. Use tools like the cellular usage tracking or dataman to see what is using data and then drill down to figure if app bug, user usage pattern, OS bug or Cellular provider-specific problem. Also use iPhone configuration utilitiy to access the phone's internal log to see if there is anything obvious/helpful there. When I was on iOS6 I could see continous dataaccessd crashes that seemed to correspond to the high cellular usage. So my problem was probably a bug in that service or some bad data that caused it to crash (which is still a bug--bad data shouldn't crash it).

Our family having the same data leak issues with Iphone5 and Verizon... Verizon wants to say is the phone... reset this, do that, turn that off... Thing is it is teen daughter's phone, the only of the four of us w this problem. Made a buch of data changes, upgraded OS...never really solved issue. Had to get a replacement iphone because of mechanical issues (lock button malfuntion), and her new phone (which was my husband's Iphone5) is now having data leaks... but never had data leaks when he used had it. So i'm really thinking this is app leak/conflict. For example: 2 days of crazy data amounts which i am certain she should have been on wifi. Tues. 152M at 4:30pm and Wed. 304M at 10:30am and 152M at 4:30. her phone alone has used 1.4G in two weeks, while the other three of us combined have only used about 600M.

any ideas???