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used 90% of data plan in first half of month?!?

R

redhawk87

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 11, 2009
181
23
Raleigh, NC
I usually only use roughly 1.1 GB of my 2 GB plan but so far I have used over 1.8 GB and I still have 14 days till the end of my cycle. I have wifi at home that my phone automatically connects to and whenever I think to check, my phone is always connected to it. I got a text Saturday in the middle of the night from Verizon saying I have used 75% of my data plan and then another text last night saying I used 90% of my data. From my understanding, Verizon sends you a text the second you reach that limit. So if I got the texts in the middle of the night, something must of been sending data then. I have not reset my cellular usage since sep 18th, but one thing that did notice is that Skype has supposedly used 1.2 GB of cellular data even though I have only signed into it 2 or 3 times since sep. 18th. Could this be the cause? I am on wifi the majority of the time so why would skype be using data? I also noticed a couple of weeks ago a sharp decrease in my battery life. My battery life has gotten better over the past few days though.

Could Skype have gone rogue? Is anyone else experiencing an uptick in data usage over the past couple of weeks?

I will ao add that on December 12th, I had used 75% of my data plan ending December 13th. That was also a little high but its not a huge jump to go from 1.1 to 1.5 so I didnt think much of it. Now I am assuming whatever is eating my data plan must of started right before the end of my last data cycle. Is it possible for something to use a ton of data while on wifi? if so why? Doesnt make much sense.
 
I've seen things like that, and you are right, LTE /3G takes the most battery power so if your phone is losing battery quickly, it is doing some LTE/3G transactions.

Your best bet is to TURN OFF Cellular data, even when at home. I noticed the iPhone is always connected to cellular data and sometimes turns off Wifi when in sleep mode.

Turn on data when you leave home and conserve (i.e. use just for iMessage and email checking)
 
I can turn off data at home and I will definitely start doing that until I figure out what's wrong. I really do not want to have to do that solely based on principal though. Before this month, I have not had any issues so there must of been something I downloaded or something I activated on my phone to get this behavior. If I could get to the root of the issue that would be better.

Can an app choose to use data instead of wifi or is that an OS level decision?
 
ALWAYS turn off cellular when you are not using it. I learned like you but burnt through 5gb out of my 10. If you leave it on and loose WiFi it goes to cellular.
 
I noticed my 5S burn through 150mb or so overnight a few days ago when it was supposed to be on WiFi. Not a huge deal to me, but still a little puzzling. Nothing was running and I received maybe one (text-only) email, and my app auto-updates and such are set to never use cellular data. I'm thinking it may be an odd bug with iOS7 - WiFi should resume from sleep mode automatically if anything beyond push notifications needs loaded.

It hasn't happened often enough or with enough data for me to care, luckily. I'd be a bit pissed if it burned through a couple of gigs somehow.
 
Lucille Carter said:
ALWAYS turn off cellular when you are not using it. I learned like you but burnt through 5gb out of my 10. If you leave it on and loose WiFi it goes to cellular.
Click to expand...

Just check the cellular tab it will tell you which app is sucking the most cellular data.

I like push notifications and updates, kind of the reason i have an iPhone so turning off data is not an appropriate solution for many. Also lack of cellular data will render iMessage useless.
 
Lucille Carter said:
ALWAYS turn off cellular when you are not using it. I learned like you but burnt through 5gb out of my 10. If you leave it on and loose WiFi it goes to cellular.
Click to expand...
The vast majority don't need to do that, while in some isolated cases (like this one perhaps) it might be of some help.
 
Col Ronson said:
Just check the cellular tab it will tell you which app is sucking the most cellular data.

I like push notifications and updates, kind of the reason i have an iPhone so turning off data is not an appropriate solution for many. Also lack of cellular data will render iMessage useless.
Click to expand...

As Col Ronson said, check your Settings -> Cellular and the individual app usage listed under "Use Cellular Data for" section. Find the culprit and maybe delete the app and reinstall.
 
Data leakage

Your iPhone May have a data leakage problem due to iCloud. Go to cellular and zero the Data usage. If your data usage goes up while connected to cellular even if you are not using any cellular capability, then you have a leakage issue.

Disabling iCloud should stop the leakage. You can let apple know and they won't do much. Ymmv
 
liteshow said:
As Col Ronson said, check your Settings -> Cellular and the individual app usage listed under "Use Cellular Data for" section. Find the culprit and maybe delete the app and reinstall.
Click to expand...

Or just turn off cell access for that app. I've done that for basically everything on my phone.
 
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