{"id":14299,"date":"2012-10-26T12:18:44","date_gmt":"2012-10-26T17:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=14299"},"modified":"2012-10-26T12:18:44","modified_gmt":"2012-10-26T17:18:44","slug":"mysterious-data-usage-plagues-the-iphone-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/hardware\/mysterious-data-usage-plagues-the-iphone-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious Data Usage Plagues The iPhone 5"},"content":{"rendered":"
Regular readers of The Consumerist<\/a><\/em> 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<\/a> by way of a carrier settings update. In a statement to The Loop<\/em><\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a><\/em> 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n