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kgbean4439's profile

Contributor

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Wednesday, December 5th, 2012 3:49 AM

iPhone 5 Data Cellular Data Usage on WiFi

Not sure if others have run into this, but I recently received a text from AT&T stating that I was about to use all of my allocated data (IPhone 5) for the month. I found this odd as it was only the 3rd and I usually only use about 75% of my data in the entire month. I checked my usage on my account and sure enough I had blown through 175mb in two hours (I have the 200mb plan). The funny thing is that I wasn't on my phone at the time (at work) and even if I had been, I am connected to WiFi. I read this and then this and I'm wondering if this issue is happening with AT&T now. I am also wondering if it's true that the iPhone 5 reverts to cellular data when it goes back to the lock screen. I can't think of another reason it's burning through data on WiFi. Reading other threads, it's clear there is a glitch here!

ACE - Professor

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1.8K Messages

11 years ago

You have the 200mb plan? For the iPhone 5, you suppose to be on iPhone LTE 4G Data Plan, personal use is 3gb, or more.  Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, your 200mb plan is for LTE tablets?

Scholar

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164 Messages

11 years ago

Have a look at this thread, and others.  I typically use 200-300mb. My husband (who was on that 200mb plan previously) typically uses about 70MB.  We went over this month. And did NOT have LTE.

 

http://forums.att.com/t5/Apple-Community-Discussion/iPhone-4s-excessive-cellular-data-usage/td-p/2950893

 

 

 

and DAILY my phone is using small bits of wifi on data, while the phone is asleep, and any time I update or download an app.  Lord only knows what would happen if I updated the phone itself.  

 

There's a lot of talk going on about it, and yes, I wonder when AT&T will officially respond. When I called them, they suggested turning off data. NOT a solution at all. 

 

There's a few threads on macrumors as well about this.

ACE - Expert

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64.7K Messages

11 years ago


@the gryphon wrote:

Have a look at this thread, and others.  I typically use 200-300mb. My husband (who was on that 200mb plan previously) typically uses about 70MB.  We went over this month. And did NOT have LTE.

 

http://forums.att.com/t5/Apple-Community-Discussion/iPhone-4s-excessive-cellular-data-usage/td-p/2950893

 

 

 

and DAILY my phone is using small bits of wifi on data, while the phone is asleep, and any time I update or download an app.  Lord only knows what would happen if I updated the phone itself.  

 

There's a lot of talk going on about it, and yes, I wonder when AT&T will officially respond. When I called them, they suggested turning off data. NOT a solution at all. 

 

There's a few threads on macrumors as well about this.


Turning off cellular data may not be a solution but it will prevent your iphone from using cellular data when you don't want it to. Call it a workaround until the problem is solved. You can always turn cellular data back on when you want the phone to use cellular data.

 

I'm just curious as to why you expect AT&T to officially respond when it is an iphone problem, not a network problem. There is simply no way for AT&T or any network carrier to control whether the iphone is using wifi or not. This problem is being reported by many iphone users, including Verizon users. Apple has even issued two supposed "fixes" specifically for Verizon but users are still saying they have the problem.

 

Scholar

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164 Messages

11 years ago


@sandblaster wrote:

@the gryphon wrote:

Have a look at this thread, and others.  I typically use 200-300mb. My husband (who was on that 200mb plan previously) typically uses about 70MB.  We went over this month. And did NOT have LTE.

 

http://forums.att.com/t5/Apple-Community-Discussion/iPhone-4s-excessive-cellular-data-usage/td-p/2950893

 

 

 

and DAILY my phone is using small bits of wifi on data, while the phone is asleep, and any time I update or download an app.  Lord only knows what would happen if I updated the phone itself.  

 

There's a lot of talk going on about it, and yes, I wonder when AT&T will officially respond. When I called them, they suggested turning off data. NOT a solution at all. 

 

There's a few threads on macrumors as well about this.


Turning off cellular data may not be a solution but it will prevent your iphone from using cellular data when you don't want it to. Call it a workaround until the problem is solved. You can always turn cellular data back on when you want the phone to use cellular data.

 

I'm just curious as to why you expect AT&T to officially respond when it is an iphone problem, not a network problem. There is simply no way for AT&T or any network carrier to control whether the iphone is using wifi or not. This problem is being reported by many iphone users, including Verizon users. Apple has even issued two supposed "fixes" specifically for Verizon but users are still saying they have the problem.

 


It is a work around. Hopefully temporary.  I would have accepted it as such had the phone rep acknowledged a problem. He suggested I didn't know how to use my phone. and said "the best thing" to do always, is leave data off, until you need to use it.Smiley Tongue

fwiw, I now turn off data when doing wifi syncs. 

Can AT&T formally acknowledge the issue, as Verizon did, and let us know what the plan is to resolve it?

Scholar

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164 Messages

11 years ago

PS: I'd ask AT&T to acknowledge the issue, since they are the ones I pay my monthly fee to. And because they are the folks I purchased this $400 device from. And since they have been super quick (on the phone) to tell me there's NO problem.

 

So I guess that's a NO to AT&T acknowledging that there's an issue (yet they will give some folks refunds). Got it. I won't ask that question here on this SUPPORT forum again.

 

Thanks for the support and help.

Voyager

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2 Messages

11 years ago

I find it amazing that posts about this issue are going back to October 2012 and it is still a problem!

I've worked with the AT&T people at the store on this issue and did all of their suggestions (resetting network setting, wiping and restoring the phone, etc).  The guy at the store couldn't figure it out and said that "no one else had ever complained about this issue"--looking on the forums, however, I see that mine is not an isolated case. 

 

What I've found with my troubleshooting:

1) The AT&T iPhones running iOS 6 are using cellular data even when the phone is connected to a wifi connection.  It is not an issue with iPhones running iOS 5.

How I know this: On one of our iPhones running iOS 6: I reset the Cellular Usage counter to zero (General-->Usage-->Cellular Usage-->Reset Statistics) and left cellular data "On" (General-->Cellular-->Cellular Data 'ON').  I confirmed that the wifi connection is active.  

I then immediately played a 5 minute YouTube video (using the new YouTube app that is available on the App Store); after playing the video, the Cellular Network Data counter showed 15KB sent & 8KB received.  

When I did the same procedure above but set cellular data "Off", there are 0KB sent and 0KB received.  

I tried this on my daughter's and my husband's iPhones, both 4s, both running iOS 6 and had the results listed above. 

 

When I tried this on my iPhone, 4s, running iOS 5, no cellular data was sent or received when I was connected to wifi (i.e., it worked the way it is supposed to work--when connected to wifi and cellular data is "On", no cellular data is sent).

 

Yesterday (Sept 6 2013), I upgraded my iOS to iOS 6 on my phone--now the phone is using cellular data usage when connected to wifi! 

 

2) I thought that it might be an issue with our router or our ISP (Comcast).  I got a new router, however, and am still having the problem. 

 

3) I did try testing it at the AT&T store--for some reason no cellular data was used when connected to wifi when I did the above test.   Why the phones would have the problem on our home wifi network and not on public wifi networks, I'm not sure. 

 

I realize that Verizon customers had this same issue when iOS 6 came out, and a patch was created to fix it.  Why, oh why, is there no patch for AT&T customers??  

My suspicion is that the issue is more widespread amongst AT&T customers than AT&T thinks--many AT&T customers still have unlimited data plans that were grandfathered in, so these people wouldn't care if their phones used cellular data over wifi connections and they also wouldn't get overage notices from AT&T. 

In my case, I didn't pay any attention to it until I turned on some of the data features on my daughter's phone--she had the phone for 5 months before I did this--& we then suddenly started getting overage notices even though she was web surfing and YouTube watching over our home wifi connection (and, no, I know she wasn't overusing the data features on the phone outside the house).  My husband & I have unlimited data plans, so we wouldn't have noticed a problem. 

 

Another likely reason that this hasn't been addressed is that AT&T claims it's an Apple issue and Apple claims it's an AT&T issue, so no one wants to take ownership of fixing the problem. 

 

I don't know if AT&T ever reads these posts, but I'd really like a response from AT&T as to how/when they are going to fix this issue that has been going on for almost a year.   Their suggestion of turning off the "cellular data" in settings is NOT a fix (especially when doing so disables text messaging between iPhones when not on a wifi network--not a good thing when my children are out and I'm trying to text to them on their phones!).

 

Has anyone had luck in fixing this problem??

 

Expert

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12.2K Messages

11 years ago

you are 100 percent correct on the IOS6 using data, prior to IOS6 the iphone would continue to utilize wifi when it went into hibernation and was charging, after IOS6 the wifi turns off in this condition now - this is a Apple issue, not a carrier issue. have verified this with a sniffer and watching for the presence of the unique IPhone MAC address, plugged in, out of hibernation, the mac address is in the trace, about 2 seconds after the device goes into hibernation the MAC address disappears from the trace showing the wifi went offline.

 

Download a app from Onavo Mobile, review the tos and install, let it monitor data usage for a couple of weeks to pinpoint what is using the data. When I did this I found that the icloud backup, itunes autosync, facebook and a couple of other apps where the culprit.

 

this is the results of using the Onavo app and some judicious work

 

data usage.PNG 

1 Attachment

Voyager

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2 Messages

11 years ago

Thanks for the reply--by 'hibernate' do you mean when the iPhone screen is locked?  I've found it to be an issue even when I turn on the phone, connect to wifi, don't lock the screen and then play a YouTube video. 

 

Maybe this will get fixed with iOS 7?? (although, I always wait as long as possible before doing an iOS update since the iOS4/battery drain fiasco, so I don't know how quick I'll be to update to iOS 7!). 

 

Contributor

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1 Message

10 years ago

This is NOT just an IPhone issue, my Nokia Lumia 1020 is draining 1GB an hour. It started doing this recently. I have reset my phone, turned off all apps, the only thing that is working is turning my phone to Airplane mode... lot of good THAT does me when I am attempting to contact ATT regarding this.

 

Does anyone else have Beats Music? I just downloaded the update for it yesterday. That is the ONLY thing that I can think of that I have done differently the past 2-3 weeks. We are on a family 10GB plan, and in 2 weeks I have hit 12GB. Two of those were this morning. I don't download music unless I am at home with WiFi, and have never downloaded videos or anything else like that. I JUST deleted the Beats Music App, and a few others trying to get the data to stop draining. I have reset my phone multiple times as well. I dont know what else to do other than go into Airplane mode or just turn off my phone.

Tutor

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8 Messages

10 years ago

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