We have a 6GB data plan shared by four smartphones. We rarely get anywhere close to going over that limit, but a few days ago we started getting text alerts on our plan usage. Within the span of an hour, we got alerts that we were at 50%, then 75%, then 90%, then at our limit, then an alert for every 1GB over until it finally stopped at 4GB over.
I pulled up the plan info on my phone and saw that it was my stepdaughter’s phone that had used up all of the data plan. She said she hadn’t been doing anything unusual, just Facebook and things like that.
Over the weekend I looked up our account info and found a page that shows a breakdown of the data plan usage. I looked at her download info and it was a couple of MB here and there throughout the month, and then Friday at 5:10 pm it shows one 8GB chunk of data being used. She says she wasn’t doing anything unusual at that time.
I’m trying to figure out what could use 8 GB of data in one big chunk like that. I found a data usage calculator online and if I’m reading it correctly, 5GB of data would be about 15 hours of video streaming on 4G. So to use 8GB of data in one pop, I’m thinking would have to be the equivalent of about 20 hours of video streaming. And even then I can’t imagine how it would show up as a single entry in the usage history.
I plan on going to talk to someone at the Verizon store after work today but I’m looking for some factual data to boost my argument that this really just isn’t possible and they need to credit us for that data usage.
We have a 2-phone plan with a 250mb plan… works fine if you’re on Wi-Fi most of the time anyway.
The only time we’ve had a problem (even on trips) is when the Mrs started using 20mb a day… every day. Took a while to find and kill. She had emailed a 175mb video to a colleague, and the phone was killing itself trying to send that impossible chunk over and over.
Look for an oversized attachment on all the channels.
But even if the phone was doing something like repeatedly trying to resend an email attachment, wouldn’t that show up in discrete chunks on the usage history, adding up over time? This was one 8GB chunk among all the little couple of MB entries. That’s what I think looks suspicious.
That’s a pretty big chunk of data. Depending on your 4G speed, that is something like one hour of downloading data at the maximum possible rate (going by this slightly out of date speed test). If you get less than optimal download speed at your house or wherever the phone was, due to poor signal or an overloaded network, the download time could be much longer.
There are apps which will show you what sort of traffic each of your apps is using in greater detail. Incidentally, streaming video in HD works out to about 1GB/hour on AT&T’s network so she could have racked that up watching videos on Facebook.
Just about the only thing that can eat that much data that fast is video. Did she leave a video feed running all night or something? YouTube will just keep chaining videos. If she put the phone down face up after watching one, it might have overridden any go-to-sleep function.
I had something happen like that once. It turned out my Android phone had some sort of malware on it that was eating up my data. After that I have always had an anti-virus program on my phone.
If she was really using that much data in that time period, her phone would have heated up noticeably. I’d contact your provider and see if they can offer you more information as to what kind of data it was and where it was sourced from.
Does her phone have a quad-hd/4K video screen? That would use a lot more data if it was able to connect to a streaming service which supported it.
Maybe it’s that the usual thing she does are ok when she’s on Wi-Fi, but that the Wi-Fi wasn’t working on Friday night so it was using data instead. I used to have trouble with using too much data, until I realized that my podcast app was downloading some stuff on my data plan, then I set it to only download when on Wi-Fi.
I’d check for malware, maybe do a clean wipe of her phone, but when you’re on Wi-Fi compared to when you’re on your data plan is something else to be aware of.
This article is about a year old, so there may be some policy or slight technical changes, but it’s worth checking to see if Facebook is autoplaying videos
I can think of two things instances that I have experiences that caused usage that high (or almost did). One is where I watched most of a season of “Breaking Bad” in 4K format all day by using my phone as a hotspot. But I didn’t care because I have an unlimited data plan from Verizon.
The other was on my stepsons iPad, which has a 5Gb limit before extra charges occur. I woke up one night to 4 alerts telling me that he was at 75%, then 90%, another at 100% and at finally at 110%. Turns out he went fell asleep while watching YouTube videos.
I went by the Verizon store at lunch today and talked to a guy there. He said it’s unusual but he’s seen it happen. Not likely to be streaming video as 8GB would be several hours of video. He said it’s possible the phone was doing a cloud storage backup or restore while on cellular instead of WiFi. He said I should be able to check her phone and see if it was doing a backup or restore around that time. He suggested calling Customer Service as they might be better able to pin down what it was than he could in the store.
I’ve bolded the important part of your post. I’ve learned a lot the last year with a son who has a similar, but not quite as bad, problem using data.
Verizon only shows you data usage in about six hour chunks. So, actually, she could have used that between 11:10 AM and 5:10 PM. Most Verizon store employees aren’t real helpful with this phenomenon.
Get her to enables all social media apps and Youtube/videos on Wi-Fi only. Period.
This. Sorry I didn’t see this sooner or I could have saved you a trip. I only do a big backup/restore (with MyBackupPro) a few times a year or before a big OS update. I easily use up 5-8GB of data when I do that. And I do it over my cell network because it only takes about 20-30 minutes. When I tried to use my work wifi, I abandoned it after 2 hours, wouldn’t have been done before my shift was over!
Mystery solved. When she got home from work tonight I was looking at her phone, and it did indeed show 9.xx GB data used for the month. As we got to talking, she mentioned that on Friday evening she had clicked on a Youtube video of 10 hours of TV static that someone had posted on Facebook. But she said she only watched about five seconds of it and then backed out.
So I guess she did do it, but I’m still surprised that it didn’t quit downloading when she quit watching and I absolutely don’t believe it could have downloaded the entire video in that short amount of time.
Actually, when I go online and look at my account info they do have a fairly detailed breakdown of the data usage. Much more granular than six hour chunks. For example on her line on the day in question there are entries for 8:26am, 10:23am, 10:56am, 1:18pm, 4:08pm, 5:06pm (the 8GB entry) and 10:08pm.
A lot of secondary providers like Facebook don’t have very good data management, and I could see the app doggedly pulling down the whole YouTube embed.
