Regular readers of The Consumerist may have seen its recent stories documenting complaints of excessive data usage on AT&T’s network with the new iPhone 5. The problem certainly isn’t a new one, but it’s difficult to pin down a definitive solution. Last month, Verizon customers with the iPhone 5 expressed the same complaints, and Verizon quickly responded with a software fix by way of a carrier settings update. In a statement to The Loop, Verizon spokesperson Torod Neptune claims the patch addresses a problem where “under certain circumstances, iPhone 5 may use Verizon cellular data while the phone is connected to a WiFi network.” While Verizon didn’t elaborate on what those circumstances are, it’s believed that the issue relates to the phone’s failure to keep a WiFi connection active when it enters sleep mode.
It certainly appears plausible that the AT&T and Sprint versions of the iPhone 5 have this same bug, though neither carrier has made an official statement at this time. The method used by AT&T to tabulate data usage complicates matters too. As Gizmodo reported a while back, smartphones like the iPhone often do their reporting of a given day’s data usage at night, after the phone has been idle for a long enough period of time. This causes a usage log to show data activity in the middle of the night on your billing statement. Unfortunately, in at least one case, AT&T seems to have double-billed the customer for this data instead of properly handling it as a side-effect of its accounting system.
It’s not unusual for iPhone users to constantly battle applications using large amounts of data too. Apple’s iCloud supports internet-based backup of the iPhone’s applications and settings, not to mention PhotoStream, which may transmit a considerable amount of data over the cellular connection in a month’s time. Other third-party applications may feature background downloading options that burn through data rapidly if not disabled.
If you use an iPhone 5 on AT&T and you’re positive you see usage that you can’t explain, the best news may come from user “santhon2” on the AT&T message forums in a thread discussing the problem. Santhon2 says he received a call from AT&T technical, where a representative said the company is aware of the problem and is gathering information about what people are doing when the data spikes occurred. The AT&T tech rep goes on to say that AT&T is working with Apple on a fix and points out that Apple’s forthcoming iOS 6.01 update refers to WiFi fixes in general, which should potentially correcting the issue.
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