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Data usage accounting on website inconsistent with billing
Two Android smartphones on a 1 GB data plan, no streaming, no YouTube, no music, on WiFi at home and at children's houses, settings to manually update apps from Google Play Store on wifi only.
I monitor our data usage almost daily via my account on my PC, and record it on a chart and a graph.
I dial DATA occasionally and get a text that reports my total data usage.
At home, we might use 50 to 100 MB in a week, combined.
While away, we use a phone as a hotspot to read news on a tablet, and may use 200 to 300 MB over a weekend.
The previous billing period, we were up to 950 MB total at the end of the last day of the billing period, information I got from My Account via my PC. A text message received after 9 pm on the last day as a result of dialing DATA confirmed that we had used 950 MB. We were home the entire time before and after the end of the billing period, on WiFi. We have PCs and WiFi connected tablets. We don't use our smartphones at home for data intensive apps, not even weather.
Yet the bill comes in stating that we used 1100 MB of data and charges us a $20 overage.
How in the world can AT&T come up with a 150 MB difference overnight?
We were home, we were on WiFi, we were not using our phones for anything but calls and texts, and the last text from AT&T, dated 9;16 pm the day the billing period closed, confirmed that our data usage was 950 MB. We were asleep the rest of the night. Even the app we are using to silence the phone on a schedule from 9:30 pm to 5 am has a setting to turn off data during that time.
Something is wrong. Why the discrepancy in our usage and our bill? Any ideas?
I know the bills are entirely computer generated and there's no little gremlin in the AT&T system adding bogus charges to the bills. But whatever the problem, if it's on the AT&T side, should be fixed. It's misleading to show a certain amount of data usage and then have an unaccounted spike appear.
BTW, a call to AT&T Customer Support and the $20 overage charge was removed.
logo412
Guru
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450 Messages
10 years ago
Hi TWC42,
Data usage that is shown on *DATA# and MyAT&T are usually on a 12 to 16 hour lag and is not in real time. So the data usage you may have seen from when you were at 950MB could have been catching up from usuage earlier in the day, explaining the increase in your bill.
Remember that all apps that have ads in them are using data and traditionally android devices use more data than most other phones. The only way to fully ensure that you are not using data is to turn off the mobile data under Settings - Wireless and Networks.
Hope this helps
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Anonymous
New Member
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25.7K Messages
10 years ago
I did some further checking. At 9:08 pm on the last day of my billing period, I dialed DATA and got a text message back from AT&T telling me I had used 951 MB of data. I went online, and looked at the "printed version" of my bill, which lists every call, text, data transfer, etc, that was made during the month. On that last day, there was NO data used on either line after 3 pm. The data used for the entire week prior to the end of the billing period was less than 50 MB. None of our phones are the culprit that caused the extra data usage.
There is no accounting for an extra 150 MB that put my usage up to 1100 MB for the entire billing period.
The only explanation is that the data reporting from AT&T is so far behind actual usage that it is misleading.
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loganic
Former Employee
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636 Messages
10 years ago
Yeah, I talked to a customer in that situation just a few days ago. Had gotten the 90% notice on her daughter line one morning, used the website to stop her data the same afternoon, 5 days later she's calling me, because she got a 100% notice. Using their website, they hadn't shown any data usage since the stop/block.
I don't remember it taking that long before, I'm not sure if it's a something about new mobileshare plans or something else.
I don't know the why, but all I can figure as that I'll be using more data monitoring via apps.
-Alex
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