Diagnosing abnormally high data usage

[murraybiscuit]

My wife has a WP8 Nokia and has chewed through 4Gb data in a week on a PAYG VC sim. She's been using the phone for surfing, email etc. nothing particularly data intensive.

The built in data monitoring app reports that she's only used just over 1GB. I've checked her usage for the past hour via a Fiddler proxy on my PC, with nothing much to report.

I really don't want to throw more data down the drain. At this point, it's difficult to know whether it's a phone setting, or a VC issue.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get to the bottom of this?

 

[bromster]

Check Facebook sync. Map updates are also about 200mb a pop, but it shouldn't do them without asking iirc. Also, just make sure you aren't downloading maps for the whole world.

 

[Siya Mava]

JA, maps are number one culprits. If you use them, make sure you look for offline maps on the app store. Does she use it for GPS too? It also uses a lot of data. Also, check if there are any apps that are updating automatically.

 

[murraybiscuit]

This turned out to be some glitch with VC and their promo data bundles. For some reason they would rapidly run out on the handset (balance checks showed usage until browsing was blocked), but they were still hardly used on the system. We logged an issue and VC credited the data as airtime. Ended up ditching the PAYG number.

 

[Dr Who]

Hi All

My wife has just had the same issue, we got nabbed by the OOB shark this month and ended up having a much larger bill. How ever the funny thing is:

1) Our data manager app shows that she has not exceeded her allowance. She gets 500mb yet has only used 300mb.
2) We moved into an area which struggles to get good reception, so much so that facebook takes a long time to display just pictures and she has done no more than what we would do previously. I cant believe that in an area with mainly edge we would be able to blow through double our monthly average.

When looking at her phone bill it seems that she makes 40 connections a day and its very constant. This really seems strange to me.

 

[The Voice]

I know someone on MTN had a similar issue. He unfortunately wasn't on prepaid though. Basically, if you're using your phone for emails as well, it will try and send and receive mails all the time. Sometimes it can't process the request properly, though, and it gets stuck in a loop, using data the entire time. Just a long shot, but could be the cause.

 

[murraybiscuit]

I know someone on MTN had a similar issue. He unfortunately wasn't on prepaid though. Basically, if you're using your phone for emails as well, it will try and send and receive mails all the time. Sometimes it can't process the request properly, though, and it gets stuck in a loop, using data the entire time. Just a long shot, but could be the cause.

Yeah, I did check the access requests via fiddler proxy on my PC for an hour or so, and also changed handsets (same OS). My wife burned through about 4Gb on 2 days, so I'm skeptical about it being a phone / OS issue, especially with the low bw stuff she was using it for (browsing/email mostly). I tried to get the top request from VC data dept, but I'm not sure it's logged or accessible for them on PAYG contracts. That would have been more helpful IMO.