I got an alert from AT&T telling me that I was nearing my data usage limit, and checking iOS 7's new "Cellular Usage" section I found that the "Corporate Accounts" system service used over 100MB of cellular data. This is a seperate item from "Exchange Accounts", and I'm not sure what it is? Is this related to my (corporate) configuration profiles? Can anyone shed light on this?
had the same issue, in our case it was my MDM solution provider centrify.com and not my corporate email.
i had it much worse, 1.2gb while the user was roaming, so hefty bill
if corporate account bandwidth usage is high in my case it meant 2 things
1) MDM solution did not work properly
2) battery life was really really bad, 2 or 3 hours max on a full charge
removing MDM solutin and reapplying seems to have fixed the issue
hope this helps and if there are any other corporate acounts usage cases i love to hear about them
I have installed Blackberry MDM BES on I phone. Been using it for the last 6 months. However in the last few days I observed that, "Corporate Accounts" under 'System Service' is been using almost 350 MB every 3 hours. Biggest Offender.
Removed that profile. clean. Now I don't see any entry named as "corporate Accounts"; No over usage.
We too are having this issue. In my case it was a matter of 1GB of data within a 24 hour period, which blew my monthly data limit. Interestingly, out of a fleet of 170 iOS devices enrolled in Airwatch, it's only happened to a single device (so far).
The question I'd like to know is, who's to blame? Apple or our MDM provider? For starters Apple could use a less ambiguous name for "corporate data", such as "MDM Data". AND if it IS related to MDM profiles in any way, why is it not recorded under data usage for the MDM app itself? i.e.Under "Use cellular data for:" the Airwatch app had only used 5 MB, however under system services, "corporate usage" had used 1.3GB
I had the same alert sent to me by AT&T. I enrolled my iPhone 5 to Windows Intune (well, not famous MDM solution by a company called Microsoft, whatever) earlier last week, then I "retired" it through Intune on Thursday or Friday. Somehow this retirement was not successful, the last date Intune could even find my iphone was on Tuesday. Anyway, under corporate accounts, it showed 1.0GB data usage on Sunday (two days before). Now it's 1.7GB. I just removed the profile installed by Windows Intune company portal to see if it can fix the problem. I guess I have to pay additional 20 dollars at least to ATT.
So timeline:
10/22 added iPhone to MDM. The device somehow cannot be contacted by MDM after this date
10/24 or 25 tried to retire iPhone from MDM, not successful.
10/27 Got the message from AT&T. Changed 2GB plan to 3GB, found the 'Corporate Accounts' has 1.0GB usage.
10/29 'Corporate Accounts' now shows 1.7GB. In AT&T usage table it shows I used 700MB+ in two days, match the change to corporate accounts. Removed corporate profile from iPhone.
Here's what's in my att data usage log:
| 10/29/2013 07:52PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 43555.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 07:46PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 19925.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 07:04PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 58504.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 06:43PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 27211.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 06:17PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 38859.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 05:52PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 27703.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 05:34PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 27133.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 05:17PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 22915.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 04:52PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 26199.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 04:03PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 29429.0 KBs | 0.00 |
| 10/29/2013 03:44PM | -- | Internet/mobile web | 36579.0 KBs | 0.00 |
Terrible. Before 10/22, my data usage was just 10~20MB per day. Now it's 200MB~300MB per day. I don't know if this is MDM's problem or Apple's problem, but to me it feels like a bug in Apple's MDM API.
The Airwatch app (or in my case, Intune portal) only install the profile and set the device to be managed by the MDM solution. It's the agent on iOS itself kept trying to talk to somewhere and generated so much traffic. And that, is implemented by Apple.
My theory: during the MDM enrollment process, there's a chance to break. iOS 7 MDM agent does not have the correct logic to handle the exception (report error then stop trying) so it will always keep trying, nonstop. Apple needs to fix it -- but can they reimburse my loss? 😟
The worst thing is, there's no way to stop it from using cellar data if you don't have WIFI coverage. I analyzed the data usage pattern - when I was at home, the data traffic was not that bad. If I was in my office or outside (see above data usage table) where doesn't have WIFI or very poor WIFI reception, then it became a huge pain.
I've spent the past couple of months tracking this down with my internal tech support group. "Corporate Accounts" is definitely Mobile Device Management a.k.a corporate configuration profiles; and I thought it might be useful to detail a couple of the tools we found useful; in case it helps you as well:
I've had this issue happen twice, both on an iPhone 6 under iOS 8, with Blackberry BES MDM software.
The first time we fixed it by deactivating my device, uninstalling the device management profile, and then setting things up again.
The second time it happened the IT people just rebooted the BES server and that stopped the problem. Unfortunately the participation of IT is required in either case, so it's not something and end-user can fix on their own.
I find it interesting that rebooting the BES server worked. (That seems to work for a number of problems, not just thing one.)
What is "Corporate Accounts" in iOS 7 Cellular Usage?
