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at&t inaccurately reporting data usage, exaggerated by many gigabytes!

M

maokh

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 9, 2007
260
18
Seattle, WA
I would like to bring to light a very strange trend that seems to have started around 6/26 for my account. I have an iPhone 4.

Before, my data averages have been about 1GB to a peak of 1.5GB during an especially active month. However, according to at&t's detailed data log (as well as the iPhone app), 3.9GB has been transferred since last monday. My phone is on WiFi quite a bit, and some of these purported extremely large data transfers while I have been asleep is just about laughable. They also do not match my iPhone data counters (which were synced over from my past iPhone, and clocking in at a paltry 12GB, sent/received over the last year)

I have attached some examples, and i challenge others to take a look as well to see if they are seeing the same...hopefully its just an isolated case.

The first image displays purported data sessions while at work and casually texting someone when I have a spare moment. The phone is just simply sitting on the table doing nothing. The second one is a search that specifically lists all of my data sessions since 6/26, several of which are very suspicious sizes.

I do not tether, not jailbroken, use facebook and just surf the web. I have randomly used Pandora, but for about 2 hours total during this week.
 

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Nothing out of the ordinary on mine. Looks like that multitasking must be working great for you!
 
....if by multitasking you mean sleeping and driving heavy amounts of traffic. 1.1GB within a day is pretty insane.

My 3GS was jailbroken with backgrounder, and I never in my wildest dreams was able to drive this much traffic.
 
I also had an unusually and ridiculously large amount of data usage on my bill this month...5.5GB...I never have used more than 2.5...very strange...
I'm calling AT&T tomorrow to get to the bottom of this...:mad:
 
I also noticed that my reported data usage was out of whack. I haven't been over 500mb in the last 6 months now it's saying I'm over 2gb. Something is screwy. I'm sure I've been using more data cause of the new phone, but I'm sure I haunt used that much.
 
I'm noticing the same thing this month. After 18 of 30 days on this cycle I've already used 200MB more than I've ever used in a single month. I don't think I'll get to my 2GB limit but it definitely seems strange. It might just be that I'm using my phone more this month but I don't think so
 
Can anyone confirm if abnormally large transfer amounts started on 6/26? Anyone here on one of the new restricted plans? It is definitely looking like this is not an isolated case.

Wow, almost at 5 gigs now. My iPhone counters, however, havent even incremented a tenth of a digit.
 
I knew with the iphone 4 it would use more data.. No one believed it.. I am happy I have my unlimited plan.. right now i am at 700MB since the 23rd.. that will jump when i start to tether( when a jailbreak comes out)


I hope you have an unlimited plan
 
I am on iP3G and since Jan '10 my monthly avg has been 62mb. I am two days into this months billing cycle and AT&T now says that I am at 28mb!! IN TWO DAYS!?!? Impossible!! I have not changed anything habits of my usage. Only diff is I downgraded to the 200mb from unlimited and went to iOS4...something is not right....:mad:
 
What the heck are you all doing on your phones that you transmit that much data? I'm in IT and use my phone all day, and I've never gone over 400mb in a month.
 
I'm having similar problems too...I haven't touched my phone pretty much all day today and it still somehow transfered 100 mb, today! I'm at 806 mb now since launch day.
 
Just to help you read the report - if you look at the first screenshot, you'll see the following entries:

06/28 5:50pm - 20 KB
06/28 7:18am - 705,928 KB
6/27 11:12 PM - 30 KB
6/27 11:09 PM - 142 KB

The report says that between 7:18am and 5:50pm you used 689 MB. It didn't happen at or prior to 7:18am, it happened during the connection that was established at 7:18am. This was during the middle of the day, when you probably were using the phone the heaviest. (From what I can tell, you reset the phone's connection at 7:18am on the 28th - possibly by rebooting the phone, or switching the connection off then on, or dropping the connection by going through a tunnel, or whatever. And again at 5:50pm. Sometimes, it's the cell network (or billing cycle) just doing it on its own.)

Also, it means that between 11:12 pm on the 27th and 7:18am the next day, the phone downloaded only 30 KB overnight - hardly anything at all. Which is to be expected.

So don't think that it's all happened while you're asleep or the phone is idle.

Here's something you can try, if you want to try some scientific investigation and you can live without cellular data for a while - turn it off. Go into Settings -> General -> Network and disable Cellular Data. Try it for a few days and monitor the usage that AT&T reports. It should be pretty close to zero.
 
I think the OP might be onto something here.

Using ATT new past data graph thing my highest usage month was 301mb. This month with 8 more days to go I'm already at 390.

More interesting is the wife lines. Her highest month was only 17.2mb. Looking at that I lowered her line from unlimited to the 200mb plan. Now this month she is already at 60 mb on my old 3G phone. I know she isn't using it more as she doesnt do anything on the phone.

I wonder if ATT is up to some funny business to pad these numbers and push them up to and over the new limits. We all know how they stick it to you if you go over the cap...
 
Does AT&T count the upstream data traffic as well?

I've used about 350MB in less than 24 hours - actually, I've hit that mark within one hour easily.

How? Just run the ookla speed test app. Over and over and over.
 
reset the counter on the iphone and then compare that counter to the att data usage reported.
 
Somebody correct my math if I've goofed:

Streaming a 128 kpbs music stream uses:
128 kilobits per second (duh :) )
16 kilobytes per second
960 kilobytes per minute
57,600 kilobytes per hour
Which is 56.25 megabytes per hour

So stream some music for four hours while you're working at your desk, and bam, you've used 225 MB in a day without really trying.
 
If the iPhone data counters actually matched what at&t's site was reporting, rather than the count being off by several gigabytes, or my usage was not normal, I would have not made this post.
 
Hmm, so here's an experiment to try:

1) Put phone in airplane mode.
2) Reset data counters.
3) Take phone out of airplane mode. Note date and time. Disable wifi.
4) Stream something at 128 kbps for two hours.
5) Put phone in airplane mode.
6) Note amount of data usage iPhone reports.
7) Take out of airplane mode, enable wifi, and use as normal.

The next day, check your AT&T usage report (it usually takes a day to show up, in my experience.) You should have an entry in the report with the timestamp of when you trurned airplane mode off the first time, step 3. Both the iPhone data counter and the AT&T report should report 50 to 60 MB used during that time.
 
Mine looks as it should be - no real difference than what I have historically experienced.

A thought - there was a posting a few days ago about AT&T or Apple pushing out network updates under iOS4 that were not possible in prior OS's. I don't remember all the details but it had something to do with insuring that jailbroken phones could not stay on the network or to insure that jailbroken phones on other networks could not continue to operate outside of AT&T.

Not to get all conspiracy theory on it - but I'm wondering if something like that is happening in certain markets and the updates, that clearly should not count against your data usage, are indeed being counted as data used. I'll see if I can find that other article.
 
elistan said:
Somebody correct my math if I've goofed:

Streaming a 128 kpbs music stream uses:
128 kilobits per second (duh :) )
16 kilobytes per second
960 kilobytes per minute
57,600 kilobytes per hour
Which is 56.25 megabytes per hour

So stream some music for four hours while you're working at your desk, and bam, you've used 225 MB in a day without really trying.
Click to expand...


i SUCK at math but i know that 1 Megabyte (MB) = 1024 Kilobytes (KB); 1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1024 MB. (Thanks to AT&T :))
 
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