Need help understanding your bill?
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Sunday, February 7th, 2016 6:18 PM
Data very high
How come if I'm on wifi at home and my phone shows the wifi symbol connected am I still occurring data charges
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Robsmy5606
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4 Messages
8 years ago
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GLIMMERMAN76
ACE - Expert
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23.9K Messages
8 years ago
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kdfederer
ACE - Expert
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13.1K Messages
8 years ago
Some of the newer operating systems have added a "wifi assist". If your phone determines your wifi signal to be slow or weak, it will change to cellular data. Turn off the wifi assist in your settings.
Set your updates to NOT use cellular data. If your phone switches to cellular data, updates can use huge amounts of data in a short period.
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GeekBoy
Master
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4.1K Messages
8 years ago
Just because you were at home when you got the notification that you had gone over your data and had an overage charge doesn;t mean that you were still using data when connected to wifi. If you read the details of the data usage section of your bill, you will see that the usage is not billed in real time, it is accumulated over 3 hour intervals, and reported when that interval closes. You could arrive home at 7:00pm and at 9:00pm receive a notice that you had gone over your limit and had another 1GB added to your account. That usage could have been almost any time between 3:00pm and 9:00pm, and it just made it through the system and into the biling system which added the overage charge.
Also, almost every smartphone maker will turn off the wifi radio when the screen goes blank to save battery, so you could be at home and still using cellular data if you are streaming music with your phone screen off. Just because you are in range of a known wifi network doesn't mean that you will always be connected to it. Most of those makers who turn the wifi off, will leave it on if you have your phone conneted to an external power source too.
The best thing that you can do is to know your phone and what it is doing. You cn go into the settings area and turn off cellular data if there are apps that are using too much data. Just compare what your phone repots to what AT&T reports and you will find that they are probably within 5-10% of each other, which means that your phone is likely actually using the data when you don't think it should be,
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