Okay Geek Farm
iPhones are secretly using your data at night?
Your iPhone could be descretely using your AT&T data plan while your sleeping - and thousands of iPhone users have confirmed this. It all started out on MacRumors.com by hgraphics, when he said that “After AT&T’s announcement of its limited data plans I took a closer look at my data usage,” and what he found was quite shocking…
AT&T data usage for “hgraphics” on MacRumors
I noticed that my iPhone 3GS is sending lots of data on its own in the middle of the night when I’m not even using it. And it’s doing so via the 3G network rather than my home wifi which is always turned on. Below is a screen shot of my data usage according to AT&T.
Note: On 06/05 at 9:07AM I was still asleep as well (had a late night out).
As you can see from hgraphics’s post, his iPhone was using small amounts of his AT&T data plan while he was sleeping, which made everyone else raise their eyebrows - and naturally, the geeks migrated over to AT&T’s data usage utility, and found that they too we’re experiencing the “secret” data usage.
Also, someone from the gdgt discussion boards added a rather shocking story:
Whoa. My wife’s iPhone is doing a 20MB transfer at around 2:00AM every day. Others are seeing this too, and it’s on track to push people over their 200MB cap without any additional usage. What is going on here? — noahmittman on gdgt
Really? 20MB of data every night? Thats about 600MB of wasted data per month, which is way over the bandwidth cap of AT&T’s new plans. Something else of interest, is that at least a thousand other people are having the exact same issue, to different degrees.
What gets me is that everyone is trying to get in touch with AT&T, but they either get stuck with a support ticket, or get no response at all. People on the MacRumors forums have ruled out the possibility of “push email updates” because they noticed that under a normal load of updates, the size was around 60KB, and this discrete, over night data usage ranges from 1-25MB.
Is anyone else having this issue? - Please let us know in the comments!
Also - check out the MacRumors forum, and the gdgt discussion board…
Brandon Davenport
This is a little scary! Just found this in the comments… “My phone has sent as much as 45Mb at night!! Always around 2:40AM” — J05h in the comments
