The iPhone 5 uses Cellular Data over WiFi?

MaKHung wrote:

The chart is my verizon wireless data chart and yes that all in MB not kb. I also have two buddies that use verizon wirelss they have exactly the same problem, so i call verizon to see whats going on and they told me that its something to do with the ios7.

Suppose you were a Verizon CSR, who gets rated on how quickly they "resolve" a phone call. What would you say to get a caller off the line as quickly as possible? And if it has something to do with iOS 7 why did this thread start 18 months ago, when iOS 7 wasn't even in anyone's dreams?

BTW, your data dump is NOT every transaction. If it was your bill would be 300 pages long, as it was for the first users of iPhones in 2007. You will see a summary record whenever you move from the catchment area (MTSO) of one set of towers to a different set of towers, as well as every 6 hours. That's how Verizon's billing system works. AT&T's is different; it also sends a single summary record to the billing system as you leave each network switch, but instead of a 6 hour summary it sends a 24 hour summary from the last switch around midnight PST.

Your chart also does not have every period as 6 hours, some with larger usage are 18 hours long. They all look like a charge for a set amount at a certain time.

The largest one on 1/31 goes from 12:18 PM to 6:18 AM doesn't really make sense as they would be an 18 hour period crossing into the next day.

Thank you deggie for try to help, i am just very fustrated trying find out what is the iphone doing 12:18 PM to 6:18 AM every day. Is it trying to do a app update during that time or something to do the os it self?

Try this as an experiment: Each night for the next month plug your iPhone into power at night and see what happens to the usage.

12:18 PM to 6:18 AM would be an 18 hour period. From noon to say 10:00PM aren't you using the phone?

Got to settings->cellular and scroll to the bottom and "Reset Statistics". This will zero out the cellular data usage stats. Periodically come back and look at the usage by app and check in system services to see where your cellular data are being consumed. Check every now and then and you can see what app is using your data. If you get lucky it is some app you hate anyway and can uninstall. If you are not so lucky it is something under system services which will be harder to pin blame and get help/fix. But at least when you call Verizon you can start the conversation with specifics about what app/function is using your cellular data.

I have been testing the cell-data usage of my AT&T iPhone5 for about a week.

Each night at about midnight I close all of the apps on my iPhone and note how much cell-data has been used at that time. The iPhone is not on a charging cable - it is unplugged. I check the iPhone around 6:30AM to see if any cell-data has been used during that 6.5 hour period. After a week, I have not seen my iPhone use cell-data if my WiFi is turned on. I usually receive 6 to 8 emails each night and 1 or 2 text messages. All of the iPhone activity takes place over WiFi and never has used any cell-data.

I have noticed that the iPhone5 uses about 1% of battery during the 6.5 hours.

I tried turning the WiFi off on 2 nights to see what would happen. Each night I received about 6 emails and a couple of text messages. The iPhone used about 6% of battery while using the cell-radio rather than the WiFi radio. Apparently the cell-radio requires more power than the WiFi-radio. Note that I get about 2 or 3 dots of cell-signal strength (out of a possible 5 dots) at my home.

I haven't received any voice calls during my testing.

So, I'm not seeing any cell-data leaks. Perhaps because I've turned off Personal Hot-Spot, Bluetooth, and cell-data for all but 12 apps.

I plan to continue testing - but, with the iPhone plugged into a charging cable to see if that makes any difference.

From my understanding of this issue is that iphone logic is now desinged to use the fatest signal to improve your phone's performance. So, let's say that you are connected to Wi-Fi and watching a YouTube video. However, you Verizon LTE signal is faster than your home Wi-Fi signal (because 3 other computer and a couple of other cell phones are connected to it), the phone will detect that your Wi-Fi signal is slower and AUTOMATICALLY switch to the Cellular signal to give you the best user experience for the phone.

Great idea of optimizing the end user experiance. But, not cool when you are on an limited data plan. Apple should have offered this as an option for optimizing performance that could be turned off.

The only solution that we have found so far is to manually turn off cellular data when we are connected to Wi-Fi. This is kind of a HUGE pain because then when you leave the house/Wi-Fi signal you have to turn cellular data back on.

Our iphone 5c is the first Apple product we have bought (besides ipod nanos and ipod touches without celluar service) and I am not impressed. Apple should design this 'feature' to prompt you if you want to switch to the faster signal (similar to the way most Android phones will prompt you if you want to switch to a Wi-Fi signal if one is available).instead of automatically assuming that this is what the user wants to do. Unless there is a fix for this issue (which I'm guessing there won't be since this has apparently been an issue since 2012) I won't be buying another Apple device. I bought it for my almost teen-aged son so that he didn't have to rebuy all of his Apps that he had purchased on his ipod touch. I have always said that I was indifferent between Android and Apple and that I only used Android because that was what I used first and just didn't feel like switching because I never had any issues. But, this has left an extremely sour taste in my mout for the Apple device.

If someone knows of a fix (other than manually swithching your cellular data on/off) please let me know. Disabling Wi-Fi for the App is not a good solution either. Because video streaming is the biggest data hog in our case and YouTube is not an App. We would have to turn off Cellular Data for web browsing which is just as big of a pain as just turning it on/off completely.

Your understanding is incorrect. If the iphone detects any trusted WiFi connection it will switch to that connection. It does not evaluate the speed of either of them.

There IS an option to turn off the LTE. Just go to the "Settings" then select "Cellular" and the second option down should be to turn on and off the LTE. When I turned off the LTE in my phone it solved all of my data useage issues.

We will give that a try. Still not the optimal solution I am looking for though. It only 'minimizes' the chance that this could happen. If our bandwidth on our router is bogged down due to the number of cnnnections, then it could still happen Then, we have downgraded the cellular service and haven't fully eliminated the potential for this to happen.

But, we will see if this makes a difference. Luckily my 12 year old has been very responsible about turning cellular data on / off so that he doesn't overuse his data package. But, he should have to.

This is a direct quote from an article I read regarding this:

"In iOS 6 betas there was a feature that would fall back to the cellular network when WiFi was low-quality. While well-intentioned, the feature becomes a bug when you've got non-unlimited data...or a bug for the carriers if you've got unlimited data.

This issue is prevalent in the iPhone 5 particularly because LTE is in fact faster than many people's home WiFi in many areas. Heck, the iPhone 5, in ideal conditions, can download faster over cellular than WiFI (two receive antennas, 20x20 FDD channel on cellular vs. 20MHz on WiFi). If carriers want a lot of data revenue, this phone is an excellent way to get it, both by showcasing their network (the iPhone pretty aggressively looks for LTE) and by using the network whenever it's better than WiFi (a fair amount of the time in areas that are running within spec capacity-wise)."

That is an article from Apple?

It has not changed in iOS 7, WiFi from a trusted network takes precedence.

This issue was introduced for IOS 6 and has not be corrected. AT&T and Verizon BOTH have support forums on this topic and there are many tech articles about it.

Sorry, doesn't work that way on mine and not having the issue.

My wireless router accesses 3 computers, 2 phones, a Wii, and an iPad, but I have not had any issues with my phone using cellular data once I turned off the LTE. When I turn off the LTE it reverts back to 3G and always uses our household wireless, as far as I know. I just checked our monthly useage (which only has 6 days left in our cycle) and my wife and I together have only used 200mb, and I watch netflix on my phone all the time while I'm laying down at home. My phone is faster with the LTE turned on, but not enough that it makes a big difference to me. My wife and I only have 1GB of data between the two of us to use every month, so we choose not to have LTE turned on because in our experience LTE uses up data VERY fast.