HUGE data usage on iPhone4 while you sleep

[MarcZ]

I really wish AT&T would go to an unlimited plan. I use mine for a hotspot also and after one week they toss the limited wifi on me.

Dead threads need their rest
-ViRGE

 

[Aristotelian]

I just became a victim of this (on my wife's phone - she ahs the 200mb plan).



This appears to be a known problem without a solution.

Before researching I called AT&T and they said that she must have left a website open overnight. I called BS.

Has this happened to you, yet?

MotionMan

This has happened to me on multiple phones (latest a Galaxy Nexus) and I am always liable for this result myself. It has always been an e-mail (on the Nexus an Exchange issue) where the e-mail push/pull uses gigabytes while I sleep until my data plan is exhausted (on pay as you go).

 

[mugs]

I was SHOCKED to find my average data used a month is over 16GB. I use the XM radio app and netflix. Thank goodness I have ATT unlimited. I think this data charge thing is just another scam. I remember the original iPad had ATT unlimited for just 25 a month. Data usage is WAY too over played by cell phone companies. All data should be unlimited and not costing more than $35 on a phone and not over $50 on a tablet/iPad for umlimited. And they know that too!

Why?

 

[MotionMan]

This has happened to me on multiple phones (latest a Galaxy Nexus) and I am always liable for this result myself. It has always been an e-mail (on the Nexus an Exchange issue) where the e-mail push/pull uses gigabytes while I sleep until my data plan is exhausted (on pay as you go).

Except that no one could explain why it happened to my wife's phone. It was not e-mail. When I called AT&T they kept trying to blame it on some app or another. I kept telling them that she did not have any of those. They gave up, but continued to blame it on something on the phone.

MotionMan

 

[Mark R]

Except that no one could explain why it happened to my wife's phone. It was not e-mail. When I called AT&T they kept trying to blame it on some app or another. I kept telling them that she did not have any of those. They gave up, but continued to blame it on something on the phone.

MotionMan

It could be anything; push notifications, e-mail, app update notifications, etc.

The problem with iOS is that when a network connection is erratic, the transactions often keep getting retried over and over again. I've noticed this on some versions with e-mail, if you have an unstable connection, messages will keep getting downloaded over and over and over again - the same ones - the download restarting from the beginning if it gets interrupted. Eventually, the mailbox update completes, and duplicate messages get purged and the system calms down. Meanwhile your battery is getting killed and data allowance demolished.

This is more a problem on the iphone than most android devices, as the iphone always prefers cellular data to wifi when the phone is not being used interactively. When the display is off, cellular data is preferred, even if wifi is available.

At least on most android devices, you can configure whether wifi is preferred when the phone is asleep (at the cost of more battery drain). This isn't an option on iOS, unless you turn off cellular data (which I ended up having to do whenever I was at home, because the patchy cellular coverage would cause massive "silent" data consumption, drain the battery, and make all the system apps (like e-mail) go haywire). Diagnosis is easier on android, too, because the OS maintains per-app data counters.