Crazy data usage

[MikeF74]

I've been noticing some crazy data usage on my 1520, and of course because I'm on AT&T I can't make use of DataSense since AT&T doesn't even pretend to try to save you money.

So, this morning my phone is nearly dead from being left in the car for a day and half over the weekend. I grab it to head to work, and on the way I'm listening to a podcast. The podcast is downloaded to my phone, but I think I'm actually still playing a streaming version because when I went to download it initially, it just sat on "pending" for too long. Anyway, that was a few days ago, and I'm just continuing that playing. So as I'm driving my 4 mile drive to work with a quick stop for drive-thru coffee, I get a text that I'm at 75% (768MB) of my 1GB overage pack. OK, weird. Then two minutes later I'm told that I'm at 100% and I'll be charged another $15. WTF!! Mind you, my phone is on battery saver and is only playing this podcast.

I get to work and look up my usage and see that during my drive, I was pulling down between 20MB and 80MB per minute for 7 minutes, for a total of 50 20MB chunks (a total of 1GB to listen to 7 minutes of a 47MB podcast). What the hell? Anybody have any ideas?

I should mention that I updated the phone to the latest firmware on Friday.

 

[DBDev]

Do you auto-upload images to SkyDrive or something?

 

[MikeF74]

Checking my data log on AT&T, I see there was no similar craziness before the update on Friday. I called AT&T and they were as baffled as I was, but had to interest in escalating this to an engineer. They just refunded me a bit of money for the overage. I'll certainly be keeping a close eye on data usage.

 

[MikeF74]

I do auto-upload images and videos, but only when attached to WiFi. I also auto-download a few podcasts, but again it's set up to only do so on WiFi. Also, since my battery was nearly dead all non-essential data usage should have shut down on the phone.

So, I don't know if this was some random glitch or if there's an issue with the latest update. I suppose a third possibility is there is some sort of issue with AT&T's systems that counts data usage, but that's a little harder to discover especially if it might be tower-spefic.

 

[MikeF74]

I needed to pop out of the office for a minute, away from Wifi. I wanted to reboot my phone to make sure I wasn't sucking down any data, but it just sat there on "Goodbye" without shutting down. Some process was obviously stuck and now allowing Windows to shut down. I had to hold down the power button for 10 seconds to force a shutdown.

 

[gsquared]

If the podcast is music it may not be actually sitting on the device. It could just be a list. Also, turn off location services and see if that solves the problem. A lot of apps do not play nicely with WP location services.

 

[Morpheus Phreak]

If the podcast is music it may not be actually sitting on the device. It could just be a list. Also, turn off location services and see if that solves the problem. A lot of apps do not play nicely with WP location services.

A podcast not sitting on the device? I could see that with a playlist perhaps...but with a podcast?

I'm new to WP8, but have been a Windows Phone user for years. I'm not aware of support for having a podcast bookmark that connects out to a stream. From what I'm aware of the podcast has to either be streamed directly from the store, or if it's showing on the device it has to actually be downloaded to it.

 

[5150 Joker]

I haven't seen the same behavior on hspa+ with ST. Podcasts dl but use very little data. Might be that firmware or some setting you don't know about. Try blocking all apps except podcasts and see what happens.

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[michail71]

I wonder if it could be an app bug? Perhaps it was spooling multiple downloads of the podcast. My network data usage tends to be lower than I often expect it to be.

 

[hangfirew8]

Having the same problem here. Watched a little video on the 1520, got warnings texts, shut down phone and of course it never really turns off, data consumption continues. Blew through 1GB cap.

Thought we had it all sorted out, got our first phone bill a few weeks later and found out phone had used another 5GB of data. They have no clue which app or why and do nothing but blame us. Phone is always on WiFi during heavy usage and only sends/receives a minor amount of email during the day. Same usage on Verizon and we never went over 1GB per phone in a month.

Of course there is no Data Sense which would just tell us what is going on.

Since we have no control we have no choice but to cancel our account. It's going to cost me a lot since I'm outside of the 14 days now, but I can't have an account that bills me random huge numbers that I have no control over.

 

[Morpheus Phreak]

AT&T? They have the MyAT&T app that gives you a fully accurate accounting of data used.

It doesn't break it out by app, but I can usually figure out the culprit with some simple disabling of background tasks then selectively re-enabling.

 

[mozman68]

This happened to my son's phone as well (iPhone 4s) and we couldn't figure out through AT&T...only that the data download in question seemed to be happening nearly once an hour even during the night when he wasn't using the phone.

Did some app tracking and found out it was Facebook...some sort of glitch. I can't remember if we unistalled and reinstalled or just did a hard restart, but it hasn't happened since.

And AT&T credited me a ton of money more than covering the data overage charges...they have always been great to work with IMHO.

 

[rodneyej]

I am having some serious data usage ever since I got this 1520. I got charged 4 $15 overages in two days, WITH DATA TURNED COMPLETELY OFF!... Of course att keeps removing the fees, but this is very annoying... Could it be time for me too swap out devices? Wait, I should probably at least do a hard reset first....

 

[Jaskys]

I am having some serious data usage ever since I got this 1520. I got charged 4 $15 overages in two days, WITH DATA TURNED COMPLETELY OFF!... Of course att keeps removing the fees, but this is very annoying... Could it be time for me too swap out devices? Wait, I should probably at least do a hard reset first....

ATT does it on purpose #SwitchToiPhone

 

[Morpheus Phreak]

ATT does it on purpose #SwitchToiPhone

Well that was a completely unnecessary post.

 

[bassoprofundo]

I had the same issue with podcasts once. I had a podcast I wanted to listen to that became available while I was on the road but was over the 50mb download limit on cell data. I chose to play it straight from the podcast app (clicked play), and I used nearly 3gb of data in one sitting. It was a video podcast so I suspect it was a decent size, but I think it basically reloaded the entire thing every time I paused/played. I still don't see how I burned that much data in a matter of hours, but it was definitely the podcast app.

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