How to turn off 4G on Samsung S3?

[hasu]

I was downloading the free Avengers movie and it had eaten up more than half of my 4G quota, eventhough I had wifi also turned on. Is there a way to disable 4G in order to force the phone to use Wifi? I am on T-Mobile if that matters.

Any help please?

 

[s44]

Airplane mode + wifi

 

[hasu]

Thank you! I am trying that now..

 

[LtMikePowelll]

Go to settings > data usage and there should be option to turn off mobile data.

 

[grkM3]

are you trying to just use 3g to save battery? dial #*#4636#*# and set the modem to only use cdma

 

[themillak]

sounds more like he's trying to get the phone to use Wifi and not mobile internet when available.

 

[zerogear]

Probably need to turn the wifi is alway in option on

 

[hasu]

I was trying to save my 4G data bandwidth while downloading the movie. Airplane mode + Wifi did the trick.

I was under the impression that if wifi is turned-on then the phone will automatically use that for all high bandwidth tasks.

One question about dialing, #*#4636#*#. Will that work with T-Mobile as well (which is GSM)? I will try that today to see how much it can extend the battery.

Thanks everyone!

 

[vshah]

what does your data usage show? it should list the apps by data consumption. I find it unlikely that if you were connected to wifi, that it was using the cell connection for the movie download. no android phone i've ever seen works like that. possibly another app used a lot of data at another time when wifi was not available.


another possibility is that there is a "avoid poor wifi connections" setting enabled, so even though wifi was on, it was switching to the cell radio if you had a poor wifi signal.

 

[bonkers325]

by default, wifi turns off when the phone screen is off. you can change this in the wifi settings.

 

[hasu]

I had wifi turned-on and I am pretty sure the data usage was by the Media Hub download ("Data Usage" menu item shows that too). I noticed the bandwidth usage when I got a notification from T-Mobile saying that I had already used up 1.5GB of data download out of 2GB.

As bonkers325 said, most likely this was happened because the wifi turned itself off while the screen went blank and the Media Hub continued with the download using the 4G connection.

 

[rcpratt]

I was under the impression that if wifi is turned-on then the phone will automatically use that for all high bandwidth tasks

There's an option to connect to WiFi networks even when WiFi is off when high data-usage applications are launched. No idea how well it works in practice.

I guess I don't really understand the issue though. Why not just wait to initiate a download until you're connected to WiFi. (edit: Oh, just read your last post.)

But yeah, I don't see why anybody would ever not use "Always" for keeping WiFi on during sleep. Makes no sense to me that anyone would ever want to have to phone switch from WiFi to 4G while sleeping. Is that really the default setting? I must have changed mine.

 

[vshah]

ah, the screen off is probably it. change it in advanced wifi settings

 

[orenero]

I have the galaxy S3 and you can use Juice Defender (Free) version to do this. Also you can manually click on the menu bar by swiping down from the top of the phone and manually uncheck mobile data. This also can be done under Settings -> More Settings - > Mobile Networks -> Use Packet Data ( uncheck this ).