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jmine83

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 9, 2011
50
0
I thought I knew how the tracking of cellular usage data was recorded by the iPhone, but apparently I am mistaken.

Last Saturday I took a road trip and on the side, I decided to see how much cellular data would be used while I had my iPhone in map navigation mode with Siri giving directions. It was approximately 3 hours of driving roundtrip. From my home location, I recorded the "Sent" and "Received" values in the "Cellular Usage" section of my iPhone settings at the very beginning of my road trip; then again when I returned to the exact same home location.

I expected that either or both of the Sent and Received values would have increased noticeably when I returned home from my road trip. My impression being that the cellular usage data is simply a cumulative total of cellular bandwidth used since the last reset of the data (my last reset being July 31).

However, the results I ended up with are as follows:

Sent (initial,final) = 31.2 MB, 29.7 MB
Received (initial,final) = 352 MB, 341 MB

As you see, for some reason the values "decreased" and not evening by very much. I am mostly very confused, however, by why the values decreased.

I also just took a look at what the values are on my phone right now, which are as follows:

Sent = 33.0 MB
Received = 352 MB

Suffice it to say, I'm at a loss in understanding the cellular usage data reported on the iPhone. I did this experiment to start with so I could precisely track and measure the amount of cellular data usage for specific Internet usage functions; e.g. map navigation, emails, texting, etc.

Feedback and insight on this is much appreciated.
 

Mrbobb

macrumors 603
Aug 27, 2012
5,009
209
Have we been playing with time machines, or be near a quantum discriminator apparatus lately? :D Most perplexing.
 
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