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Cmaryinuk's profile

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Wednesday, August 13th, 2014 8:15 PM

On wifi then charged data

Hello, so I was sitting at home watching tv when I received an Espn alert about the jags. Immediately I received a warning that I had gone over my data limit. However I am on my home wifi and I know that it is connected because my computer is also in wifi and I can connect to the internet. What happened? I was just charged 15 bucks for a gig of data to be used by tomorrow when my data rolls over. Does the iPhone use both data and wifi at he same time? I'm a little upset. Thank you

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Master

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4.1K Messages

10 years ago


@Cmaryinuk wrote:
Hello, so I was sitting at home watching tv when I received an Espn alert about the jags. Immediately I received a warning that I had gone over my data limit. However I am on my home wifi and I know that it is connected because my computer is also in wifi and I can connect to the internet. What happened? I was just charged 15 bucks for a gig of data to be used by tomorrow when my data rolls over. Does the iPhone use both data and wifi at he same time? I'm a little upset. Thank you

By design,  Apple will turn off the wifi radio in an iPhone when it enters a sleep mode.  They do this to conserve battery and allow you to go longer between charges, but when this happens, if your iPhone does any background processes that access the internet (like checking for email, etc) those processes will now use the only network connection that is available, your cellular data plan.  Another part of the design by Apple is that if you are connected to an external power source, it is not supposed to turn the wifi radio off, and then it will only use wifi for all network traffic.  From personal experience, in the early releases of iOS 6, the iPhone 5 didn't always keep the wifi radio on when it was connected to external power, and could tend to use more cellular data, but I have not seen that since one of the first iOS 6 updates.

 

Regretfully, just because you are within range of your home wifi network does not mean that your iPhone will use it.  That is just one of the games Apple plays to try to strecth that battery a few minutes more between recharges.

Teacher

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10 Messages

9 years ago

Last week I called customer support as i needed to add an internation plan.  I added the 300mb plan as i will be international for about 5 days.  Michael from AT&T explained that to save cell data usage you should turn off LTE as traffic will flow over both LTE and WiFi at the same time (in addition to the data roaming switch).   He further emphasized - when you are in your home connected to wifi, data will travel over both your LTE connection AND wifi.  So if you are not needing LTE, turn it OFF.

 

Would love to see any responses from the rest of you as to the validity of this.

 

-ox

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