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Very strange wi-fi issue

RDowson

RDowson

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 22, 2010
301
108
Glasgow, Scotland
Hi. Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this.

The problem I have is with a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 4 and an iPad.

The moment I turn on the wifi on any of them my router starts flashing like crazy as it would seem that lots of data is being transferred. On the MacBook Pro I noticed that its transferring large amounts of data. This is slowing down the connection for web browsing.

The data is transferring even when I have all Internet apps closed.

The only thing I can think of is that all three devices are tied to the same iCloud account and there is an Apple TV 2 in the network. Could they be transferring data to that or some other iCloud related service?

When I use my own personal iPhone 4S on the same network I don't get the problem! My iPhone is on my iCloud account which is different to the account that the other devices are using.

That's the only thing I can think of at the moment. Anyone else have any ideas? If it is that then why are the devices transferring so much data?!

Thanks in advance. It's driving me crazy!
 
Could be iCloud, could be something like Dropbox, could be a whole slew of applications checking with the mothership.

Does it stop or significantly reduce after a while (say, an hour or two)?

You say you have closed all your Internet applications. Do you mean closed, or quit? Mail.app in particular will keep checking email when you've closed all its windows. Unlike Windows, OS X keeps apps running even if they have no open windows.

You note there's a lot of data being transferred from the MacBook Pro in particular. There's an exceedingly small but non-zero chance your machine is infected with the Flashback trojan. Checking is easy; see http://www.macworld.com/article/1166254/what_you_need_to_know_about_the_flashback_trojan.html
 
I think the router "flashing like crazy" is a bit dramatic. Routers will flash when they are sending/receiving packets, you can't use it as a measure of how much data is being transferred.
 
I used activity monitor to measure the data being transferred.

It may be photo stream updating. I added photos on the mac which would explain the data being sent as it sends the photos to photo stream. The iPhone and iPad may be receiving the photos.

Does iPhoto for mac update photostream when the app is fully closed though? If so that I'm sure that's what the issue is.

My iPhone doesn't get the photos as my photostream is on my own iCloud account which explains why my phone is fine.
 
Problem Solved!!!

It was Photo Stream that was uploading/downloading photos in the background.

This leads me onto another question though:

Does Photo Stream in iPhoto for Mac store the images permanently or do I have to enable Automatic Import? It seems like by having that enabled you have the same images saved twice. Once under the Photo Stream tab and once in an event under the Events tab.

It's really confusing me :confused:
 
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