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Help Suddenly massive data usage???

J

johnnyq

Lurker
Both my wife and i have captivates. I use data all time time for work and have an unlimited plan. My wife has not come close to using all of her plan the entire time she has had the phone. For some reason she has used all 200 mb of her plan in the 4 dayssince our bill rolled over, and most of the usage is occurring at night when we are sleeping. I called ATT and they say there is no way to tell what apps are using the data and when. Is this true, or is there some way to track this?

Short of resetting the phone, what are my options? I don't want a $700 phone bill due to this.

Thanks
 
If you can't figure it out, try turning off all data when going to sleep, that way it can't send/receive data at all, but will still be able to get texts and calls during the night.
 
In the application manager, at menu > settings > applications > manage applications, you can click on any app/widget and have a look at how much total space, app space, and data space is used up to that moment. Scroll down a bit after clicking on the app name.

Keeping track of that over several days will give you a pretty good idea of what apps (and associated services, if you learn about which services drive which apps/widgets) are at the hog trough all night.
 
I had this problem a few months ago. I used nearly 160 mbs in 3 days, after using 20 mbs the entire month before. As near as I could tell, after some help from a very knowledgeable AT&T person (yes, there may be one or two left, but they are hard to find), one of my apps never fully uninstalled. We could never figure out which apps was the cause of the trouble. In my case, an app that I tried to uninstall, only uninstalled half way. What was left kept trying to call home. It used data at night because that was when I normally turn off my wifi. The solution was to do a factory reset. This solved the problem, but was a PITA, since I had to do a manual reinstall of my apps, so that I would not reinstall the half app.
When I was having this problem, I called AT&T and they increased my data plan from 200 mbs to 2 gigs for one month, at no charge, to give time to figure out what was going on. Call them and try to get to tier 2 tech support. They don't seem to be reading scripts and can usually be of some help.
 
Frisco said:
In the application manager, at menu > settings > applications > manage applications, you can click on any app/widget and have a look at how much total space, app space, and data space is used up to that moment. Scroll down a bit after clicking on the app name.

Keeping track of that over several days will give you a pretty good idea of what apps (and associated services, if you learn about which services drive which apps/widgets) are at the hog trough all night.
Click to expand...

I don't think this is going to help. Data space is the amount of application data stored on the phone, not the amount of data that the application has transferred.

If you are rooted, get an app called Droidwall, available on the Market. It allows you to restrict the network access of any app on 3G and/or Wifi. AT&T won't help you because as soon as your go over your 200 MB limit, you pay more. It is in their best interests for you not to know what is using so much data.
 
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