iPhone 3GS is sending lots of data on its own!

jimbean9 said:

As you can see my iphone 3g was sending a crazy amount of data in the middle of the night. I've sold mine in preperation for the iphone 4 but looking at this im gonna get screwed on data charges with these new contracts

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One thing I forgot to mention was that the CSR I spoke with said AT&T was aware of the problem, and that CSRs were told it was apps updating. The fact that she said AT&T is aware of the problem is a big step from what I was told previously. There are going to be too many people complaining (with a certain amount of online press likely) for this to not get fixed or conclusively figured out in some way. People are going to all start checking their usage when they begin to be told they are using their phones more than they know they are.

jimbean9 said:

As you can see my iphone 3g was sending a crazy amount of data in the middle of the night. I've sold mine in preperation for the iphone 4 but looking at this im gonna get screwed on data charges with these new contracts

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Unless you don't use any data.... I'm pretty sure that it's aggregating your data use over the day. 80MB in a day isn't terribly unusual if you are pulling down video or a lot of image-heavy websites. The front page of MacRumors is over a MB just by itself.

People posting O2 bills... there's absolutely nothing wrong. I don't think it's hard to see that your phones are NOT sending or receiving huge amounts of data at midnight. That's simply the time that the O2 billing system is reporting the amount of data being used during that day.

Did nobody else spot that the times you actually use the iPhone most (i.e. during the day) are absent from the bills?

Krevnik said:

Apps not running cannot call home. If the code ain't executing, it can't do jack.

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http://is.gd/cNQvb

/thread (2008)

nozebleed said:

http://is.gd/cNQvb

/thread (2008)

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Doesn't properly account for the billing information being seen... at all...

A blacklist check of 0 apps isn't MBs in size.

-Garry- said:

People posting O2 bills... there's absolutely nothing wrong. I don't think it's hard to see that your phones are NOT sending or receiving huge amounts of data at midnight. That's simply the time that the O2 billing system is reporting the amount of data being used during that day.

Did nobody else spot that the times you actually use the iPhone most (i.e. during the day) are absent from the bills?

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2.9GB in 1 month tells me theres something wrong

jimbean9 said:

2.9GB in 1 month tells me theres something wrong

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Only if you aren't actually using any data.

What is your phone usage like during the day? How often do you pull up web pages over 3G? Do you use YouTube over 3G? Pandora? Any other video/audio streaming apps over 3G? Get a lot of e-mail with attachments?

Apple was negotiating the unlimited data plans because they were expecting iPhone users to be heavy data users.

Krevnik said:

Only if you aren't actually using any data.

What is your phone usage like during the day? How often do you pull up web pages over 3G? Do you use YouTube over 3G? Pandora? Any other video/audio streaming apps over 3G? Get a lot of e-mail with attachments?

Apple was negotiating the unlimited data plans because they were expecting iPhone users to be heavy data users.

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yeah i stream radio via wunderradio for about 1 hour per day, also have 4 email accounts with push on, i also mainly use twitter

jimbean9 said:

yeah i stream radio via wunderradio for about 1 hour per day, also have 4 email accounts with push on, i also mainly use twitter

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Streaming radio at say, 128kbps over 3G for an hour a day is shy of 2GB a month. Or about 60MB an hour.

Krevnik said:

Streaming radio at say, 128kbps over 3G for an hour a day is shy of 2GB a month. Or about 60MB an hour.

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wow that is crazy i didnt realise that! kinda wish iphone had a fm radio built in now

-Garry- said:

People posting O2 bills... there's absolutely nothing wrong. I don't think it's hard to see that your phones are NOT sending or receiving huge amounts of data at midnight. That's simply the time that the O2 billing system is reporting the amount of data being used during that day.

Did nobody else spot that the times you actually use the iPhone most (i.e. during the day) are absent from the bills?

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As already noted, unless it is reporting only a partial amount, this cannot be. My usage shows the times I used data yesterday during the day correctly, but last night shows usage at ~2 AM, even though my phone was in airplane mode.

leodavinci0 said:

As already noted, unless it is reporting only a partial amount, this cannot be. My usage shows the times I used data yesterday during the day correctly, but last night shows usage at ~2 AM, even though my phone was in airplane mode.

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Are you talking about the O2 website? I assume you are...

It's not showing usage at 2AM - it's showing the time that previous data usage was billed for. I don't work for O2 so I can't tell you exactly how their systems work but think about it - you can't 'bill in real time' so O2's billing system will update at certain periods. That could be each day or at the end of each 'session' (although that's doubtful since iPhones send data to the network almost constantly, for things like notifications and push e-mail).

I'm not saying O2 are reporting the correct amount of data usage - I wouldn't possibly presume to tell you what your data usage is. But I am certain that they're not telling you WHEN the data usage actually occurred.

Third night spent with the phone turned off - and just like the previous two, no data usage being reported for 1:30am-ish.

Another night spent turned off (#4), another night without 1:00am data transfer. Gosh, this is helping my data usage rate. (Yes, the previous 1:00am transfers are indeed included in my usage total AT&T reports.)

Another night spent turned off, another repeat of the same story.
What I'm noticing, however, is that data usage is being reported for the minute that the phone is turned on each morning.
It's almost as if the phone reports to the network the aggregate data usage throughout the day. However, since that would open the door for abuse, I wonder if AT&T's network is simply checking in with the phone before posting data usage to the account.

So my theory is back to thinking it's a data usage summary. It just needs the phone to be on to do it for some reason. Otherwise, it happens at 2am-ish.

elistan said:

Another night spent turned off, another repeat of the same story.
What I'm noticing, however, is that data usage is being reported for the minute that the phone is turned on each morning.
It's almost as if the phone reports to the network the aggregate data usage throughout the day. However, since that would open the door for abuse, I wonder if AT&T's network is simply checking in with the phone before posting data usage to the account.

So my theory is back to thinking it's a data usage summary. It just needs the phone to be on to do it for some reason. Otherwise, it happens at 2am-ish.

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I've been doing the same thing, and noticing the same thing. I'm thinking the small data usage that is seen after airplane mode is disabled is a result of Push. To clarify again to comments above, I am still seeing data usage during the day at the times I used it. I am on AT&T, not O2. I'm just going to wait for more people to start noticing this problem once the first month or two of the limited data plan runs its course. With those complaints we should figure this out, whether this is some data correction for the day, or a flat out error on Apple or AT&T's part.

nozebleed said:

http://is.gd/cNQvb

/thread (2008)

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What's with this recent trend of people posting ******** tinyurl's for legitimate websites? It's completely unecessary, and it's the exact kind of URL's you get in spam for viruses and phishing sites.

Why don't you learn how to use the forum software.

I was out of the country last week and had my data roaming turned off, i turned my data roaming on to update a facebook status on the facebook app and then turned it back off again, i checked the usage as it is £3MB when roaming on O2 and i had used 21MB of Data!!!!!!! i then had a txt from O2 saying i had spent over £50 on data, so this is not the data aggregating up, i used the phone again a couple of days later to do the same thing and it only used 500kb i called O2 and they credited my account but something is definatly a miss here.

Eso said:

What's with this recent trend of people posting ******** tinyurl's for legitimate websites? It's completely unecessary, and it's the exact kind of URL's you get in spam for viruses and phishing sites.

Why don't you learn how to use the forum software.

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For one thing, using these can help us track how many times the link has been used.

DATE TIME TO/FROM TYPE DIRECTION MSG/KB/MIN
06/16 02:44 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 15555KB
06/15 02:44 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 11618KB
06/14 08:42 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 975KB
06/14 02:34 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 20776KB
06/13 02:34 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 11593KB
06/12 04:13 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 3133KB
06/12 10:39 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 5237KB
06/12 02:49 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 17360KB
06/11 11:03 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 395KB
06/11 09:50 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 18KB
06/11 08:53 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 180KB
06/11 07:57 PM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 77KB
06/11 02:43 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 8918KB
06/10 02:10 AM phone Internet/MEdia Net Sent 9762KB

I'm wondering if there is some kind of roll up in usage. I know the phone was used throughout the day a lot more than that to surf things and use facebook app and what not. The reason I say that is on 6/16 at around 8:30 I updated multiple applications on the phone over 3G. There was no service charge at all.

Glad I decided to stay with $30 plan.

PLEASE Report to AT&T

I noticed the same thing on both mine and my wife's iPhone.

I called AT&T to ask what it was, and they opened up a support ticket for this.

However, they said they had not heard of this issue before. So if you do see this on your data usage statement, PLEASE let AT&T know, so they can flag this in their system as a reoccurring issue for multiple users.

Is there anyone that is getting this same data usage and NOT JB?

Could any of the Cydia or cracked apps have a Trojan horse?

dagomike said:

Only thing I can think of is this is batch report of data usage. So, every night it just "bills" the record for a bunch of smaller sessions.

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I could see that. You can't expect it to bill every time you check macrumors.com

I've got an iPhone 3G on Telstra in Australia - 150MB data allocation.. My phone has never used random data in the night, but I know Telstra's billing isn't instantaneous, so larger amounts of data may show up some time after the data was actually used (up to about a 24 hour data 'session'), instead of many, many small increments. An annoying thing with Telstra's billing is every single one of these sessions ends up itemised on the bill!

Starting the night of 6/10, morning of 6/11, I've been turning off my phone for the night.
Previously, I'd get some sort of data usage showing up at 1:30am-ish on my AT&T report.
This is on an entirely stock first-gen iPhone. No jailbreak.
Since starting this experiment, I haven't gotten a single 1:30am-ish data transfer.
However, I now get similar data transfer amounts shown at the exact time I turn on my phone in the morning.
No other data usages are shown during the day (for the most part, I still get an occasional usage shown for some other time of day.)
The amount of usage seems consistent with how much I used the phone the previous day.

My conclusions:
The data usage being reported is a summary of the day's use.
The reporting of this usage somehow happens with a conversation between the iPhone and AT&T's systems. This conversation is scheduled to happen very early in the morning, but if the phone is turned off at that time it happens the next time it's powered up. I have no idea why this is - I would have assumed that data usage would be tracked entirely on AT&T's side of things. (I wonder if this means that tampering with the iPhone would allow somebody to report false data usage numbers to AT&T.)

Therefore, while it may look weird on your data usage report from AT&T, I have no reason to suspect it's anything to be concerned about. It's just your legitimate usage showing up in a strange way.