AT&T Late Night Data Usage Mystery Cleared

by on July 29, 2010 in AT&T, iPhone News

There have been reports that many iPhone users noticed that their iPhone used up a bunch of data in the early morning hours. Some crafty users also found that these data packets appear to be sent to AT&T when the phone wasn’t being used at all.

So far there hasn’t been any solid answers from AT&T until now.

image1 AT&T Late Night Data Usage Mystery Cleared

We finally have been given an explanation after Gizmodo did a story on this issue.

This is a routine update of your daily data activity on your device to ensure the accuracy of your data billing. Customers are not charged for data usage, given that no data session is generated. It’s not uncommon for devices that are ‘always on’, like iPhone, to process data event records for billing purposes after a certain amount of inactivity or after long periods of time. It’s also separate from how our system lets you monitor your data consumption.

It’s really great to know that this doesn’t count towards your iPhone data usage just like the text messages to AT&T to get your minute/data usage don’t count.

{ via Gizmodo }


pixel AT&T Late Night Data Usage Mystery Cleared

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Shriya is the editor and webmaster here besides writing on iPhone stuff. She also posts lovely recipes at her Indian food blog, SpicyTasty.com! Twitter: @shriya00 - She's also a WordPress whiz: KarShan Media
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    • Visitor

      Are you really going to believe anything ATT says?
      The same ATT who several years ago sold its soul (& ours) to the NSA?
      Or have you already forgotten the ATT Spy Room as exposed on PBS & all over the news?
      And the suit that was filed against ATT by the EFF re same?

      Approx 400 people have posted to the Apple Support forums thread about this & it is definitely not over.

    • http://conigs.com conigs

      I don’t buy that it doesn’t count towards your bill. Especially since today, the first day of my billing cycle and the first day on a limited data plan, I had a 26MB data transfer at 2AM. My usage for the cycle is marked as 26MB/200MB.

      I also have yet to see a reason for the spike in (seemingly everyone’s) data usage in April/May, just before they announce the limited data plans. I really think there’s an issue with their data reporting.

    • http://mikebranski.com/ Mike Branski

      I got the iPhone 4 at launch, previously having another phone with a different carrier. I went from being at 65% of my monthly limit (200mb) three days ago to being 29.5 MB over my limit today. My logs showed early morning spikes of data usage anywhere between 7 MB all the way up to almost 60 MB, and it’s definitely counting against my total. I’m going to give AT&T a call this weekend to try and resolve this.

    • http://www.topiphoneresource.info karthik

      Mike, that is something I’d be worried about too. Please share with us what you find with AT&T. Thanks!

    • Natalie

      I just got off the phone with AT&T and all she could tell me was these were “system updates” not AT&T related. I am in week 1 of my billing cycle and have already almost surpassed by 200mb which I never even came close to with my Blackberry. Anyone know what this is??

    • http://mikebranski.com/ Mike Branski

      Hey karthik, I called AT&T and the CSR was very confused, and he eventually transferred me to Apple tech support. The guy I spoke with was friendly, but said it’s an AT&T thing. Instead of going back and forth, I just upped myself to the 2GB data plan to avoid the insane overage fee and decided to monitor my data usage closely.

      What it appears to be in my case is that I started receiving an influx of HTML e-mail newsletters from sites like NewEgg – which are typically very graphic intensive. The catch is that I typically didn’t actually start reading them until I was walking into work, which meant I was first opening them over 3G and downloading upwards of 60MB of images at a time.

      So, mystery solved! (In my case, anyway.)

    • http://www.topiphoneresource.info karthik

      Mike,

      Thanks for following up on this issue and updating us. Wow, that is something I never considered. HTML newsletters with with so many images!

      Definitely something to keep in mind while investigating this.

      Cheers!

    • SteveP

      Mike, I don’t think your emails from places like NewEgg, even with lots of images, would be anywhere close to 60MB. 60KB, yes, but not 60MB. Looking through my inbox, at similar messages, most are 10-30KB. But even if they were all 60KB – it would take reading 1000 of those to get up to 60MB.

      Unless you were downloading some VERY large files attached to an email, I don’t think the email usage would explain this mystery.

    • http://mikebranski.com/ Mike Branski

      Hi Steve,

      As both a photographer and web developer, I can assure you that an e-mail with 30 product images can get VERY high in MB very quickly, especially when they’re optimized for desktops and not mobile. :) I also never said it was any one e-mail that hit 60 MB by itself. If you consider getting a few in one night, coupled with normal data usage, it’s easy to see how it could add up quickly.

      Cheers,
      Mike

    • Justin

      Me thinks Mike works for AT&T… You may get tons of full sized photos in ur email, but the average user does not. As mentioned by SteveP, even graphics heavy ad emails from websites are not big. If they were people would unsubscribe from them all from filling up their inboxes.

    • siri

      I am in second month of iphone 200MB data plan. For the first 28 days my usage was 95 MB and 29th day at 12:05 AM my usage is 206 MB. That too sent data only. This is driving me crazy. I called AT&T and all they can mumble is iphone is always updating. What is it updating and why the data is ‘sent’ if it is updating?

    • Justin

      UPDATE: So cellular data (in Settings) has been turned OFF since last Monday (1 week). Over the course of the week, data usage went up 13 MB according to AT&T and on Sunday morning, it reported 40 MB more! so 53 mystery MB and cell data is turned OFF! Interestingly, the data usage counter, which I reset on Thursday showed 0MB sent or received.