Q: The iPhone 5 uses Cellular Data over WiFi?

Ok,  now this is just geting crazy.  I'm in my house.  It's sunday.  I don't touch my phone.  it sits on the charger.  All day.  I look at the usage at 6pm 526MB of Mobile Data has been consumed in the past half hour.

The first time a resturaunt overcharges you for a meal,  it's an honest mistake.  But if it happens again and again, you call the police and report a crime.

This was a bug.  But as every day goes by and Apple doesn't acknowledge it, and users continued to get billed for it, it starts to feel more and more like fraud and less and less like a bug.

Steven,

There are 52 pages of dialog on this forum, a total of 780 posts.

And if you browse the forum, most of the iPhone users who posted here looking for guidance have managed to get their Cellular Data Usage sorted out [very few have posted looking for help more than a few times].

It woulds seem then to be a matter of zeroing in the way you use your iPhone, and the set up of apps, processes or network that are being "offensive".

Rule #1: turn off Apps when you are done with them.

Rule #2: be aware that if your WiFi connection is lost, the iPhone will switch to LTE, but that should not mater, if your apps are set up to behave as you want them too...

Again, follow the guidelines as posted in this forum, carefully, as others have done, and I am confident you will quickly get sorted.

Wow Robert, What planet are you on?  Most people do not solve this problem and are continuing to try to resolve it in many ways , including getting rid of their iPhones, complaining to the FCC, etc.  Lucky you if your phone did respond to the changes you made.  Ours has not.

Robert,

The moment I updated to iOS 6 my usage shot through the roof.  I have shut off iTunes Match, closed all aps, done a full wipe and reboot, gotten a new phone, and been dealing with this since September.

I don't stream music or watch video. Just email.  But the phone often consumes 1gig a day.  I sit 20 feet away from wifi at work and at home.

Oh, and I run a tech company.  this is a bug. Apple knows it and AT&T knows it.

Plain and simple.

Robert, I posted when I first got my iphone 5 many months ago.  Right out of the box I saw an immediate change in how data was being used on my new iPhone 5 compared to my iPhone 4.  In just a few days I was forced to turn off my data for the rest of the month in order to avoid overages.  Now I am forced to keep data turned off unless I actually need it.  This is not a solution.  I never had to resort to this with my iphone 4.

I've been silently following this thread hoping that something would come from this.  Hoping that enough people would voice their concern and that Apple would acknowledge that there is a problem.

Nothing is happening.  They continue to be silent.  Now I'm quietly waiting for the inevitable class action lawsuit.

Since you run a tech company and know this is as bug can you tell me why it is not happening on mine?

It is a laugh that a computer engineer does not understand how bugs occur to even ask that question.  Bugs occur when there are conflicts between two or more resources competing for the same resource, and create a collision, causing the crash or failure of completing the requested resource in accessing the wifi.  I have even documented the system crash log in this thread earlier on how the wifi connections are repeatedly crashed by other resources, causing wifi to fail, thus resorting to use cellular data to complete the data requests.

Why did it not happen to your device? As simple as the fact that your iPhone does not use the same apps as others that caused the crash and/or conflicts.  It has been reported numerous times in this thread that microsoft mail exchange network caused the wifi to fail repeatedly every 3 sec.  Too bad you don't use MS mail exchange to cause your iPhone to fail.

Why did restoring and reset the iPhone from backup resolved the problem?  Because it resolved the conflicts when everything is re-initialized, resolving the conflict.  Why did the wifi problem resurfaced after awhile?  Because poorly written system resources starts to accummulate up to a point that resource conflicts re-occur again.

Have you ever programmed multi-threaded programs before?  I feel sorry for you if you have not. One of the classic conflicts, which is extremely difficult to debug, in concurrent programming is deadlock.  Have you ever heard of "deadlock" before?  Do you know what deadlock is?  Do you know how deadlock occurs?  Do you know why deadlock is unpredictable and extremely difficult to reproduce?  Do you know just because your app did not create a deadlock does not mean other apps would not create deadlock?

If you want to know, deadlock is created when 2 processes request the same system resource at the same time, but both are blocked from the resource unless the other releases it.  It creates a contention, no one is giving in, both are fighting for the same thing, so no one wins, no one get any resource, and this goes on to infinity. It is caused by the timing of the request, it only happens when the resources are requested by 2 or more processes at the same time.  If they were requested at different time, it is a non-issue.  But when will they be requested at the same time is entirely unpredictable, even with the same apps running.  It is one of the biggest problems and biggest bug that is extremely difficult to catch and track down.  The only way to resolve a deadlock is when the system times out, realizing that it takes forever to get the resource, the system simply kills the processes and restart from scratch.  But in the meantime, while the processes are in deadlock, the wifi is inaccessible.  This defaults the system into using cellular data, even when wifi is connected.

If you don't understand this, go back and read the textbook on this classic bug that is next to impossible to debug or track down if the program was poorly written that leads to this unpredictable behavior.

Is it a bug?  Yes, of course it is.

How do I know?  Because I filed the bug report.

Is Apple working on this problem? Yes, they are.

How do I know? Because I've been working with Apple's engineers on this bug, helping them to track down the source of the problem, diagnosing through multiple iterations to identify where the source of the problem is.

Will they fix the bug?  I believe if they track it down to the source and nail the problem, they will.

When will they fix it?  It's anybody's guess.  I hope it will be soon.

just pathetic from Apple...

this is a worldwide phenomena...i've had this happen to me in 3 different countries with different networks....

<Edited By Host>

As others have said repeatedly, the problem is caused by Podcast App and iCloud.

Delete podcast app, delete iCloud account from phone and its fine.

With both I had 1GB in 2 weeks. The following month without them I had 400gb which is my normal use.

Read the forum, follow the advice and stop whinging.

Wrong MissMichel. I have both the podcast and iCloud features switched off.

who knows?  my son's iphone does not have the bug but my daughter's does: both have ios6....  We have been trying to sort htis problem out with ATT and Apple since December.

Wrong MissMichel.

If you would follow your own advice and read the posts here, you'll find repeatedly that there is no one single solution that works for everybody. As with sunking101, the solution that seems to have worked for you, has not worked for many of us. I've never had podcast, and I did not have iCloud on my phone. I have done every little tweak known to man. And the phone still leaks when it should not - and when previous iOS's did not.

Here is the issue:

For years I have used between 2-4GB of data a month. Consistently, without fail. After upfating to iOS6, my data usage went through the roof. In 18 days I used around 11GB of data.

I tried to figure out what in my usage was different. For days I could not  think of anything. Then I started reading posts about the iPhone still using cellular data even when connected to WiFi.

That was it. I started streaming Soundhound when I fall asleep for between 30-45 min about 3-4 days a week. It should be using my WiFi netwok, but it's not. It continues to use cellular data (LTE).

I think this is a similar, if not the same, bug that Verizon users experienced (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5526)

And Apple needs to fix this. Acknowledge it and fix it.

Thank you so much