Is AT&T running some sort of data scam?

@Zuekini

 

As fellow customers we are here to provide information and help where we can.  But we have a few requests.

1.  For mercy sake, punctuation.  You post is very difficult to understand due to lack of it.

 

2.  Unrelated to the original thread.  If you have a problem, tacking it onto someone else's thread will not get you the attention yup want or should get.

 

3.  A time line and each event or issue listed so that we understand what happened AND WHY.

 

4.   Data plans don't get changed for no reason, there is always an incident which triggers the change.  Knowing when, may also give you an idea why.

 

5.   We all have to pay for our phones now.  All carriers dropped contracts.  

-   My ex is on my account, his phone broke after 2 years and he bought a cheap phone to replace it right away.  $40 total.  Not having a smartphone in a line is not ATTs fault.  They sell several smartphones as gophones that cost less than $200 total, not a contract price.   

 

I haven't purchased an ATT phone since I switched 2.5 years ago.  There are plenty of flagship quality phones out there for half what popular name brands sell for.  

 

 

Another thing that should get mentioned here, is the apps.  People have tons of apps installed these days, and even the preinstalled in-box apps can be data-intensive, in some cases, PARTICULARLY when THEY UPDATE.  An app can go from nominal data usage overnight, to heavy data usage, with no warning.

 

The phone's data counters, as everyone has mentioned, and I almost never see anyone reply with their numbers, will reflect this, down to the mb/kb.  
Mine does, and similar to @GeekBoy, I've tracked mine before, both Win Phones and Android, and I too have seen either exact numbers, or in a few cases, AT&T has also charged me for less data than I used, by my phones' count. 

The reason for less data is most likely due to data compression, in that some apps and similar will compress things, in the background.  

 

At any rate, please check your data counters, almost any phone has them built in, and look to see what's really using your data!

 

Like @lizdance40 mentions, there's no way in the world, per privacy laws, that AT&T can tell you what your data is being used for, and believe me, you don't want them to be "monitoring" this, it would be disturbing, the laws are there for good reason!

 

@pgrey.  

".....Another thing that should get mentioned here, is the apps. People have tons of apps installed these days, and even the preinstalled in-box apps can be data-intensive, in some cases, PARTICULARLY when THEY UPDATE. An app can go from nominal data usage overnight, to heavy data usage, with no warning......."

 

Just to name names, Spotify.   Both my sons use Spotify and every time there is an update it seems to default to high quality, which uses 2-4 times the data as lower quality.   My older son pay for premium and caches music, which significantly cuts data use.

 

 

Thank you for the info. I need all I can get on this subject. I am on a budget and just cant be frivolous with my service.

@Potts143. How much are you paying for the 30 gig plan?  

 

@Zuekini.  The most important things to take away, is you can control your data if you are more proactive.  Either by turning data off, changing plans to the new one with no overage.  And you don't have to buy $650 phones.  The great thing about ATT GSM network is there are lots of phones that will make work on ATT that don't cost $650 or more.

 

 

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@GeekBoy wrote:

@lizdance40 In response to your data usage records,  a year or two ago, I did a reset of my iPhone cellular data counters after 1 year of not resetting them.  When I compared the numbers my iPhone reported to the sum of what AT&T had billed me for during that same time, I got the results that my phone reported I had used about 19GB of data, and AT&T had billed me for about 19.2GB of data cross that full year.

 

I just sat down and did similar for the most recent year and I see that for the period of 7-20-2015 to 9-20-2016 my iPhone has reported that I used 68GB of cellular data.  That is a huge jump, but I'm not surprised because I know I have used more data.  More interesting is that I look at my AT&T bills for the period and I see that for 7-20-2015 to 8-19-2016 AT&T has billed me for 49.11GB of data usage.  Now, my billing cycle just ended so I can't see my most recent month's usage on the AT&T site, but based on my known usage for the month and my wife's usage for the month, I know that AT&T could not have billed me for more than 10GB of data, which would mean that AT&T will have billed me for no more than 60GB of data usage for the same period that my phone reports I used 68GB of data.  This points to the fact that AT&T is obviously scamming me on my data use charges billing me for 8GB less data than I really used for those 14 or 15 months...

 

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@GeekBoy

 

So you figure ATT gave away about 8 gigs?   

 

Im actually impressed your phone was s close last year.   

 

 

@lizdance40 I've had mine be that close too, on occasion.  I don't always track/compare monthlies, but a couple of times I've done it and had it add within <50mb or so, pretty impressive.

I had a couple of "odd" months too, like @GeekBoy, where I came in under what my phone reported, I'm still trying to figure out how the compression gets around the data-counting algorithm, but I haven't exactly done a deep-dive on it.

 

I've never had it come over the other way, where it looked like I got charged for more data than I used, not once, at least on the months that I've checked.

 

Maybe I should write a really good data-use tool, hmm; probably should dig around first though, there are probably some out there, easier to view, at-a-glance, than the built-in ones.  

It'd be nifty to have a login to AT&T, and pull the data too, and show users graphs for things like daily and monthly match-ups, hmm... ;-]

On monthly data usage, I've had large variations.  I suspect that most of those are due to when AT&T resets vs when I rest my phone.  Most months I'm within 300-500MB of what AT&T says.  It's when I aggregate over time that my measures usually get closer to what AT&T reports.  My most recent data counters reset on my iPhone 6 was for 8 months of data.  It's aross those 8 months that I show that I used a large amount more than what AT&T has billed me for.

 

In my case, I suspect that my most recent month will be slightly offset on my next month's bill, especially since I had a large amount of data usage right at the end of my billing cycle with the arrival of my new iPhone 7 just a few days before my billing cycle ended.  Just like with the individual months prior, the under/over reporting by AT&T will likely come close to balancing out on my next bill.

I know what your talking about. My husband, myself, and I have a shared 10GB data plan for the last 3 years and have never come close to the 75% usage line. Well come June 2016 my husband phone and mine were paid off (ATT next plan) and my sons will be done this November and lo and behold our data is constant at risk of being over limit. Nothing changed with how we use our phones nor have we been using them for anything different when it comes to streaming. So here's what we found after keeping watch on data alerts and usage since July bill: July- 1/2 a week before end of billing cycle alert states 80% data used. Aug - 1 week 2 days before cycle ended states 89% data used Sept. - 1 & 1/2 weeks before billing cycle ends alerted that 95% data used. Of course now we have no choice but to get charged $15 per extra 1Gb used until end of billing. So in 4 days prior to end we were charged 3Gb at $15 a Gb. Our bill is amazingly now the SAME AMOUNT as it was when we still paid on our phones. Come October - 2 weeks before billing end just got a text stating 75 % data used. ATT is SCAMMING US AND TRYING TO FORCE US INTO A PLAN WITH A MONTHLY BILL EQUAL TO WHAT WE PAID WHEN WE OWED ON OUR PHONES.