Yes, every iPhone performs a nightly data dump of all your text messages, emails, & web browsing history to Apples data mining server farm.
Steve's making billions selling your data to the US Govt and others.
(just kidding...maybe)
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AT&T Sued Over Alleged Overbilling for iOS Device Data Usage
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Steve's making billions selling your data to the US Govt and others.
(just kidding...maybe)
It seems to me that the tiered data plans are not implemented very well. Why don't they leave all plans unlimited and price by pipe size? For example Edge = $20, 3G = $30, 4G = $40. They could even implement a throttled version of Edge for budget users. Everybody is now happy and power users a charged accordingly.
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protocol overhead?
I wonder if their expert knows about "protocol overhead", In other words to download a 1MB file about 1.1MB of data is sent. This is just the headers and routing on each packet of data. It is like the box that Amazon puts around what you buy, that have to pay to ship the box even if you just throw it away. Or the envelope on a first class letter.
I suspect AT&T charges for every byte of data, even the byte you as a consumer don't understand or know about.
I wonder if their expert knows about "protocol overhead", In other words to download a 1MB file about 1.1MB of data is sent. This is just the headers and routing on each packet of data. It is like the box that Amazon puts around what you buy, that have to pay to ship the box even if you just throw it away. Or the envelope on a first class letter.
I suspect AT&T charges for every byte of data, even the byte you as a consumer don't understand or know about.
i think its time for the unlimited data plan to come back!
this 2GB data plan is really retarded. i get a text everytime i go over saying they are charging me $10 for 1GB. and i get like 15 of those in one day!
i say we ALL just go to Verizon! hahaha
this 2GB data plan is really retarded. i get a text everytime i go over saying they are charging me $10 for 1GB. and i get like 15 of those in one day!
i say we ALL just go to Verizon! hahaha
PC World notes that the greater-than-expected data usage may in some cases be related to Apple's multitasking features deployed in iOS 4
So why isn't Apple getting sued?
So why isn't Apple getting sued?
2,292KB = 2,292,000 bytes. ie. 2MB data was used in 10 days when the phone didn't have any apps running/no push e-mail/etc. Assuming it trends that way, it's 6MB/month. Small amount, but if you are on a 250MB plan, you are essentially paying for getting 244MB of data (and can be pushed over your limit if you think you have 250MB).
I don't think that is it. My usage has gone way up with data usage during times when I am at home surrounded by wifi. Over Christmas I had 2 big days of data usage when I never left my house. I had already gotten the warning email for high data usage so I was watching to make sure I was on wifi whenever I picked up my phone. My wife also had 60Mb one evening when we were at home.
I called AT&T and they had no good answer for me.
Something is fishy with their data usage measurements.
I have confidence in their actuaries. If they're pricing it this way, it's because they feel they can suck more money out of us than your way.
I don't think so.
Good analogy is gas stations. There are meters at the pump that need to be calibrated to protect the consumer. You buy 10 gal of gas you get 10 gal of gas. You can see the meter (usually). But its calibrated by external authority to prevent companies from ripping off the consumer. Why is this is place? Companies were riping off the consumer.
Now, ATT sells you so much bandwidth per month. If you go over, they charge you.
Where is the independent measurement of usage? There isn't! I don't know how you could independantly measure it either.
Simple answer - unlimited plans ONLY. All carriers!
The middle of the night time logs will not match up with emails and push notifications. These logs/billings are the often the added up summary of stuff that actually happened during the day, but wasn't billed then.
The only way to check this is with a 3G microcell (and wifi) behind a logging firewall. Then, from the firewall logs, you can see if there were data transfers during the day that were not billed till night, and exactly how much "chatter" occurs in the middle of the night (probably not much).
Well, there is an independent measurement of usage. The data measurement built-in on iOS/iPhone itself. However as we know, AT&T doesn't look at that and use their own kind of measurement, which obviously cannot be checked by an independent entity.
On one end of the graph, Apple is the darling of "The Gullibles". On the other, they are the darling of Wall St. As a result Apple is nearly untouchable. They can do no wrong, nor are they subject to any consequences. They are free to run amok profit taking at every turn.
Law suit will be a dead cause
Like some of the other posters have already pointed out, the overhead of the IP transport is not being taken into account.
Most carriers globally charged carriage (data) based on the amount of bytes used within the radio network to shift data to/from the device terminal and the cellular network. IP blocks have a fixed size typically set by the carrier to optimise the performance (speed), resource capacity (spectrum) and device (battery life impacts). Its a delicate equation.
And the irony is the the faster the network, the bigger the block size needs to be, so the download speed is not hampered by the number (and latency) of ACKs/NACKs sent up the upload channel.
Carriers need to charge this way. To send one byte of data from a device involves the same overhead in sending 30 bytes. If a user sent 30 bytes in individual one byte transmissions then they would accumulate 30 times the network resources to accommodate the same amount of user traffic - but if they didn't charge for IP transport overhead the user would pay the same.
Simple analogy - when you post a letter in the mail you pay a fee (stamp) regardless of whether the letter contains one letter or a page of words. Its the same here. Its the same in this case, there is a fixed cost for delivery that has to be considered here.
Determining true network utilisation for delivery of video streams we would usually account an 8% overhead in our calculations (to cover streaming protocol overhead and IP overheads). This is around the minimum overhead that should be considered because video streams usually utilise the full IP packet - eg are fully optimised to match the IP transport.
So in summary, what an iPhone actually receives in number of bytes received and sends in bytes transmitted is overalll more than applications may report.
Like some of the other posters have already pointed out, the overhead of the IP transport is not being taken into account.
Most carriers globally charged carriage (data) based on the amount of bytes used within the radio network to shift data to/from the device terminal and the cellular network. IP blocks have a fixed size typically set by the carrier to optimise the performance (speed), resource capacity (spectrum) and device (battery life impacts). Its a delicate equation.
And the irony is the the faster the network, the bigger the block size needs to be, so the download speed is not hampered by the number (and latency) of ACKs/NACKs sent up the upload channel.
Carriers need to charge this way. To send one byte of data from a device involves the same overhead in sending 30 bytes. If a user sent 30 bytes in individual one byte transmissions then they would accumulate 30 times the network resources to accommodate the same amount of user traffic - but if they didn't charge for IP transport overhead the user would pay the same.
Simple analogy - when you post a letter in the mail you pay a fee (stamp) regardless of whether the letter contains one letter or a page of words. Its the same here. Its the same in this case, there is a fixed cost for delivery that has to be considered here.
Determining true network utilisation for delivery of video streams we would usually account an 8% overhead in our calculations (to cover streaming protocol overhead and IP overheads). This is around the minimum overhead that should be considered because video streams usually utilise the full IP packet - eg are fully optimised to match the IP transport.
So in summary, what an iPhone actually receives in number of bytes received and sends in bytes transmitted is overalll more than applications may report.
My take
I think I have been screwed uniquely
Data usage prior to 2 to 5 days of the end of billing cycle gets spilled over to next cycle. The dumb explanation that I get from AT&T is that reconciliation of data usage during roaming takes time. When I point to them that I have never left my city for the past few months, I get a silence from the other end or a weird answer like "you may not have realized but you did hop onto a different carrier". Offcourse I do not expect the first line to give their network design but sometimes I do get surprised by lack of basic information by their front line
I think I have been screwed uniquely
Data usage prior to 2 to 5 days of the end of billing cycle gets spilled over to next cycle. The dumb explanation that I get from AT&T is that reconciliation of data usage during roaming takes time. When I point to them that I have never left my city for the past few months, I get a silence from the other end or a weird answer like "you may not have realized but you did hop onto a different carrier". Offcourse I do not expect the first line to give their network design but sometimes I do get surprised by lack of basic information by their front line
A friend of mine recently got an iPhone 3GS with the 200mb plan. In the two days after he got his iPhone, his data usage was 146 mb, and he swears he wasn't doing anything besides looking at text-based sites on the Net. He does almost all of his data tasks over WiFi. His location and push services are off.
So I had him do a little experiment. I told him to reset his usage statistics and let the iPhone just sit overnight. The next morning, his iPhone had mysteriously racked up about 2 mb of data usage.
There really is something screwy going on.
So I had him do a little experiment. I told him to reset his usage statistics and let the iPhone just sit overnight. The next morning, his iPhone had mysteriously racked up about 2 mb of data usage.
There really is something screwy going on.
I'll answer this seriously since no one else bothered to.
From what I remember of that hooplah, the reason for the 3am call was to transfer statistics every night to AT&T for data usage from the previous day. Rather than have the phone talking to AT&T every time a push notification or some other tiny little insignificant bit of data service usage happened, the phone would store all this information and then phone AT&T late at night to tell them the data usage statistics for the last cycle.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)
I don't buy it. Got a link?
Why dont AT&T's own people know this?
I don't buy it. Got a link?
Why dont AT&T's own people know this?
I was initially on the 200mb iP4 plan and watched my usage like a hawk. I have wifi at every place that I spend any significant amount of time. I signed up for the 200mb plan when switching to the iPhone after looking at the bill from my blackberry, which didn't have wifi. Surprisingly, heavy usage of my blackberry averaged 70mb or less per month (yeah I understand the iPhone displays more images, multimedia etc.) so I figured iPhone4 with wifi would do well with a 200mb plan. On the night before my billing cycle ended, I'd shown 65% data used and did not touch the phone. At 2am, (after the billing cycle had reset, making me unable to upgrade to the 2GB plan and avoid a $15 overage) I received a text notification and email saying I had passed the limit. The phone had been idle for 8 hours and had used only wifi prior to that. AT&T's awful customer service could not explain to me how the phone had used over 35% in an evening when the first 65% lasted more than 29 full days. Luckily they removed the charge, but what frustrates me is that the MyWireless app and the iphone's internal data statistics aren't even remotely accurate. The only thing the rep had to say was that it can take "up to 72 hours to calculate data usage". Unacceptable.
Does this mean if you restored the phone every evening before this data reconciliation you'd never get billed?
And I still don't understand why so many people choose not to unlock/jailbreak their devices, use tmobile, get unlimited data, and pay one single flat rate every month, with no contract. I've been nothing but satisfied as a jailbroken iPhone tmobile customer.
The phone's not compatible with T-Mo's 3G system in the US.
Was never an issue anyways with unlimited data plans.
Really now, who DIDN'T see this coming?
Not to mention the morons at the "independent firm" fail to understand that iOS has several functions built-in to the OS that use data. One such feature is the Push Notification Service. There is no "Setting" to turn off PNS. If they actually had an issue with AT&T incorrectly billing them they could simply slide the little "Cellular Data" switch to the off position and let the phone sit for 2 months so they can verify a whole billing cycle. Also besides the overhead of TCP/IP use that you pointed out, there is a little thing with the internet called dropped packets. 53k to load a 50k webpage is far from abnormal. This just sounds to me some cheap @#$ chose to use a $15 data plan and used more than 200MB of data. This is likely the same cheap @#$ who would complain if all AT&T offered was $30 unlimited data. I hope AT&T counter sues this guy as well as this "independent firm".
A coupon for 10% off a box of Tictacs.
A cool test would be to put your phone in a microwave (power off) for a few days. Because the microwave should block all RF energy, there should be no data billed.
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If ATT is doing anything wrong, it is billing for book keeping data. Things like QOS and position information exchanged with the towers. Honestly, I don't know if billing for that would be wrong or not.