WP8 data usage on You Tube

[hangfirew8]

After 3 weeks of careful usage, we blew through 860MB of data and exceeded our data cap in less than an hour.* We did it by letting our toddler watch two different cartoons on youtube, which he started and stopped a bunch of times.

While I understand that video is data intensive, we did the same thing every weekend on Verizon/Android and never exceeded 500MB in a month, while it only took one try on AT&T/WP8.

Is there something especially inefficient about WP8's Youtube implementation? A conversation with AT&T Tech Support concluded with the idea that it was probably reloading the entire video every time the show was accidentally stopped or exited. I can't believe Microsoft would be so incredibly inefficient compared to Android, I mean, the use case is exactly the same- same toddler watching the same cartoons we watched on Android.

Does anyone have some experience or knowledge about this? Also can I track data usage by app or service?

*Of course we got some warning texts after the fact. Thanks, AT&T. Also there's no Data Sense on this phone. Thanks, AT&T.

 

[CyclingGuyNola]

I remember when I was on ATT you could go to your account via website and view activity such as Data. Another one was to dial *3282# and it would display Data activity but I never tried it.

This is one thing ATT has done to put customers in a hard place blocking Data Sense. I love it on my phone (Tmobile) but I've been blasting through 2.5GB a month using the Internet Sharing on my laptop and tablet and bit the bullet and went unlimited.

I've seen some videos that continually suck data and with my 3 yr old, I finally just downloaded an app in the store called Kids Movies: http://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=8bcf1c64-e785-40bf-b497-a77e3260f7ab that she loves and hasn't seemed to eat as much Data.

 

[hangfirew8]

Just a followup, we've moved from AT&T to Straight Talk. I signed up for their usage tracking by texting USAGE to 611611 and confirming. There is a big Terms and Conditions that basically says their data is late and they take no responsibility for it. I'd say that is right. On my Android phone, My Data Manager says I used 46MB, 611611 says 2MB. It is at least 2 days behind.

Still haven't found anything in real-time monitoring for the Windows phone, but at least if we go over 2GB, we just get throttled, not billed.

 

[JW888]

How about "myAT&T" app, it update pretty well