I don’t have a smartphone, but my coworker does. She and her ‘family plan’ members have been using a more than their allotted data plan allows. I suspect that some or all of them are connecting to the Internet using their data plan instead of, where available, their Wi-Fi connection. This is a warning I heard when smartphones started coming on the scene: If you’re traveling, make sure you’re accessing the Internet through your Wi-Fi instead of racking up roaming charges and whatnot on the phone.
As I said, I don’t have a smartphone; so I don’t know what to tell my coworker. How can she ensure that when she is in a Wi-Fi hotspot, her phone (Nokia Lumia) uses the Wi-Fi instead of her data plan?
Settings > Wireless and Networks > Enable WiFi for my Android. You can also disable mobile data as well, but I think that’s overkill. The phones know not to use the mobile network when connected to WiFi.
Mine has a Wi-Fi logo in the status bar to let me know I’m on a Wi-Fi network.
PS What kind of phone they have and which network would help us considerably. Otherwise you’ll get people like me telling you how we do it on our phone, but that may or may not be the way to do it on your coworker’s phones.
Just for the record, this should be a fairly straightforward thing to do on most smartphones. Do they have a manual or guide or something that came with their phones? It should spell out in detail how to enable and connect to Wi-Fi.
Oh, that’s a Windows phone. Sorry, can’t help you there.
Like I said though, this is a pretty basic smartphone function, so a quick google or forum search (if the manual is lost or doesn’t help) is all it should take for her to get up to speed.
For a Windows phone, like most phones, you should be using WiFi whenever it’s connected (shown by a WiFi symbol at the top of the screen). However, WP8 has a feature where it’ll use the cell connection as a backup if your WiFi connection is weak. To deactivate that, go to Settings > Cellular, and switch the "limited WiFi connectivity setting to “Don’t use cellular data”. This will make the phone not use the data plan unless there’s no wifi connectivity at all.
Alternately, to be extra sure, you can go to Settings > cellular and switch the “data connection” option to “off”. This will make the phone not use the data plan at all until its switched back on, which is a pain, but probably less of one than paying overages.
Don’t know if this is available for Windows phones, but there is a very nice Android app called smart wifi that automatically connects to wifi if you’re in a location where you’ve used wifi before. Works a charm, hope it or similar is available on Windows phones.
