3GS Mystery Data Usage

[assagai]

I've been using my 3GS with a prepaid vodacom sim and data is vanishing, no idea where.

Yesterday i put in R30 and locked the phone, when i checked my balance a couple of hours later is was R0 - location is off, notifications are off, no accidental calls were made - running JB 3.1.2 - this has happened a couple of times already, anyone have any ideas?

Thankfully i didn't have my contract sim in there or i'd be getting a nasty bill!

 

[MikeCTZA]

I've been using my 3GS with a prepaid vodacom sim and data is vanishing, no idea where.
Yesterday i put in R30 and locked the phone, when i checked my balance a couple of hours later is was R0 - location is off, notifications are off, no accidental calls were made - running JB 3.1.2 - this has happened a couple of times already, anyone have any ideas?

Strange. What do the data counters say under Settings, General, Usage. R30 would equate to 15MB so could be a place to start looking, but not knowing what it was before the R30 makes it harder. 15MB is a lot to just disappear, you could PM Vodacom3g and ask for him to check what the amount was used on, I don't know if Vodacom4Me will show you that for a prepaid SIM, maybe look see.

 

[assagai]

Very odd - this is what i see on the logs at vc4me, but no idea which app or service used all this data.

2 GPRS 2009-12-23 16:50:26 - internet 149 2097152 R -3.99 No 0
3 GPRS 2009-12-23 16:47:57 - internet 149 2097152 R -4.00 No 0
4 GPRS 2009-12-23 16:45:27 - internet 150 2097152 R -3.99 No 0
5 GPRS 2009-12-23 16:42:58 - internet 149 2097152 R -4.00 No 0
6 GPRS 2009-12-23 16:40:29 - internet 149 2097152 R -3.99 No 0
7 GPRS 2009-12-23 16:37:19 - internet 190 2097152 R -4.00 No 0

the previous logs show the same thing, always amounts of R4.00 or R3.99 being deducted.

 

[MikeCTZA]

It kinda looks as though something tried to be downloaded then failed then retried immediately again.
As you said the phone was locked - so in theory NO data should have been used at all, if anything could be push but as you already said - push notifications were not on, so it can't be that which caused it. I can't think what would have cause it then.
Is the phone jailbroken and if yes what additional apps do you have installed, anything system related? Not that those would really account for it either. Your data APN is set to the iphone.internet.za one I assume (again not that it would make a difference).
Very weird. Just to be safe I'd power off and on the phone. I'd be interested to hear if you ever find out what did it.

 

[assagai]

jailbroken, cydia installed and a bunch of mobile substrate add-ons (backgrounder etc) but nothing unusual, using internet apn cos iphone apn never seems to work for me, it is strange... i'm too nervous to recharge the sim cos it's just wasting my money....

 

[MikeCTZA]

what apps were running when you locked the phone? ie which were backgrounded, could be something to do with that and maybe one of them was polling for something, just guessing though, I could be totally wrong.

 

[assagai]

what apps were running when you locked the phone? ie which were backgrounded, could be something to do with that and maybe one of them was polling for something, just guessing though, I could be totally wrong.

as far as i know - none - could be wrong though.
Will load up R12 later and see if i can find out what's going on.

 

[DION786]

IMHO

As far as i am concerned, this is my impression as well,..
My calcs yesterday showed me,.
155.3mb in out,.. iphone data usage counter
177.7mb used,.. *111hash / voda's usage counter,..
as if i am being charged 14% on my data usage,. VAT x2 effectively,.. hmmm

As far as i am concerned, Vodacom LOVES the iphone for it seemingly can just swoop away at your data bill,..

I have modded my host.php file to cut all ads,. i have modded my safari browser to block all pics,.. [now someone is going to pipe up here that iphone safari browser is a fully integrated browser,.. ] -duh- no lies jacko,..

Really!? then why on earth with everything shut down, is this baby still using all this freaking data,.. in excess of 5mb a day for no rhyme or reason,..

Very odd,.. and frustrating,.. esp when you hacked patched and cracked the thing to hell and gone,.. The only explanation is that Vodacom wins,..

 

[MikeCTZA]

Very weird. My iPhone certainly doesn't do any of what you guys are having.
Well .... I have 2 ways to maybe stop it.
1. I use GConnect so need to go through their landing page to get up and running so (even though it is a pain) it would stop me in this case, unless there was some poll that kept it live. A hassle sometime but I don't use a lot of 3G data so works for me.
2. Change the data APN to something wrong when not using it. I have heard that drains the battery a bit so you'd need to test it, but would stop data from flowing. If you are Jailbroken there is a SBSettings toggle that does that for you.
Both are a bit of a pain if you wanna then quickly do something and have to login or change APN back to surf/work online.
All very weird.

 

[MikeCTZA]

Just been thinking about this a bit more. I know you (assagai) said this but just going through my mind troubleshooting/process.
Check:
Settings
* Notifications (Push) is Off
* General: Location Services - shouldn't make a difference being on or off, mine is on.
* Mail/Contacts/Calendars - Fetch New Data is set to OFF (this isn't the same as Push so thought I'd mention it)

Are all your apps up-to-date from the AppStore? I say that as I have seen in the middle of nowhere the (1) or whatever no. notification pop up saying there is new apps there. Maybe that is sucking your data.
I an not at all sure about this one .... Safari doesn't exit when you exit it (Apple leaves it running), now ... I am not sure if that means it will update any web page if you have one open that is set to auto refresh. I would lose all Safari tabs and then check that as well.
Curious as to what is going on here.

 

[topx]

iphone 3gs data usage

I have to agree with mikectza, this is very strange!

I have two cellpone contracts, the iphone is on a business top up 500 at vodacom and after reading this thread i decided to log my airtime usage for a few days, today is day three and my airtime is still exactly where it was, not one cent missing, so i honestly believe that your problem lies somewhere else.

I used sbsettings but found that it drained my battery very quickly, my battery life went down from 5 to 2 days, so i removed it and restarted the phone, now i have no prolems whatsoever.

PS: everything is switched off on my phone that uses internet, push notification, mail is on manual, etc.

 

[assagai]

OK i restored the phone, didn't add anything unusual, topped up with R60 and it's all disappeared again!

4 GPRS 2010-02-18 10:43:06 - iphone.vodacom.za 234 2097152 R -3.99 No 0
5 GPRS 2010-02-18 10:39:54 - iphone.vodacom.za 192 2097152 R -4.00 No 0
6 GPRS 2010-02-18 10:36:59 - iphone.vodacom.za 175 2097152 R -3.99 No 0
7 GPRS 2010-02-18 10:34:00 - iphone.vodacom.za 179 2097152 R -4.00 No 0
8 GPRS 2010-02-18 10:30:58 - iphone.vodacom.za 182 2097152 R -3.99 No 0
9 GPRS 2010-02-18 10:26:25 - iphone.vodacom.za 273 2097152 R -4.00 No 0

basically can't get to the bottom of this, my iphone is just an ipod now because of this mysterious data consumption....

anyone have any ideas?
push is disabled but shouldn't use this much data anyway.
no websites in the browser history, no calls in call history...

 

[MikeCTZA]

That sucks, can't say I have any more suggestions than the ones I mentioned before in previous posts in this thread. I certainly haven't heard of any of the people I know with iPhone's who are having anything like this happening. If I think of anything else I'll let you know.

 

[fxit_man]

Very weird...

Do you have any mail accounts? If so, try delete all of these to try and diagnose the problem..Then check usage logs after a day or so like above

 

[assagai]

No mail accounts, fresh restore. Only thing I can think of is some kind of sim-linked data service?

 

[fxit_man]

Hmm give voda a ring and see which services your sim is registered for.

 

[morkhans]

No mail accounts, fresh restore. Only thing I can think of is some kind of sim-linked data service?

So complete fresh restore as it would come out of the box? And you have restored none of your settings or apps? If there is something linked to the SIM then putting in a different SIM should confirm or rule out that theory.

I once saw data loss back in OS 2 days when mail got stuck downloading somehow, but it went away after a reboot.

 

[fxit_man]

hey man

any luck with this? just thought of something.. You can use an SBSettings Data toggle paired with "Data Blocker" (which keeps data blocked after a reboot), which will disable/enable EDGE/GPRS/3G at the touch of the toggle..

So keep it disabled until you want to use it, in which case you would enable..

I know it's a temporary solution for now, but better than having your airtime diminish for no apparent reason until you find out what's causing it.. I would think it's a SIM service as you've said before.. Perhaps you can ask your service provider to provide you more information on where exactly the data was traveling to?

 

[Hydrofire]

Did you happen to change your root password after you jailbroke your phone? I didn't initially, and acquired a variant of that Australian iPhone worm. Data usage climbed and battery life bombed, because it was constantly attempting to spread itself around by port-scanning other devices in its data IP range.

 

[assagai]

didn't change the password, but i doubt it's a worm, will change it anyway.
Data is disabled now, i just use the damn thing as an ipod in airplane mode. Luckily i have a blackberry for regular use.
Don't currently have the time to investigate the problem and sit on the phone with voda.