Vodacom 3G customers data gets chowed for no reason, help pls?

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Kix

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So one of my best friends and also my girlfriend uses Vodacom 3G to connect to the internet. My friend is on a contract and GF is on prepaid.

My friend is on a 125mb package as she uses the internet very sparingly. For the last three months though, she has been getting R2500+ bills from Vodacom. She took her PC and the modem in to Vodacom and they could not find any software on her PC that could have used the data, nor could they give any other explanation.

Now my GF is having the same problem. Opening Gmail and browsing Facebook for about 5 minutes uses about 40mb. I've seen it with my own eyes. I've also checked her PC. It's set to ask for downloading Windows updates, antivirus updates were done 2 days ago. What the heck could be going on here?

I've been browsing for the last couple of hours on MTN 3G and I've now used 7.3MB in total.

Help?
 
I'm not saying this is the case, but I'll tell you what I heard once....
A lady was complaining that her bill was high, and that she hardly used her spare laptop. When someone investigated by looking at her system log, her partner was logging onto the web while she was at work/asleep.

Another thing, I've noticed with my dad that he has alot of unnecessary add-ons/toolbars. Everytime any software asks him to activate/install an add-on, out of ignorance, he chooses yes.

Here are some recommendations:
1. Turn off automatic windows updates.
2. Get a good antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-malware program and do a full system scan to make sure there is nothing strange lurking around.
3. Uninstall all unnecessary programs, add-ons, toolbars, etc.
4. What is the chance that your gmail content and facebook content is video intensive? Alot of pictures, video, music may use alot of data.
5. Disconnect from the internet when not actively browsing.
6. Get to know your data use pattern and buy a suitable bundle. e.g I tend to use about 2GB per month - so a 125MB plan wont work for me.
7. Take a good look at your itemised usage - look at the data usage vs time spent connected. Check that the rate per MB is correct as per your tariff plan.
8. My dad also tends to send big pictures/videos/presentations via email - sometimes up to a few MB. Sometimes this fails to send/be recieved. The computer then constantly retries. Every retry results in the upload/download restarting. I guess I'm saying that you should watch the size of your uploads/downloads.
 
Plug her modem into your PC to check if Vodacom is "robbing" her of her data. If the data usage with her modem connected to your pc is low, there's probably a program running in the background that's eating the cap.
 
Sounds incredibly strange. there must be a programme running in the background that chowing the bandwidth....
 
Kix said:
So one of my best friends and also my girlfriend uses Vodacom 3G to connect to the internet. My friend is on a contract and GF is on prepaid.

My friend is on a 125mb package as she uses the internet very sparingly. For the last three months though, she has been getting R2500+ bills from Vodacom. She took her PC and the modem in to Vodacom and they could not find any software on her PC that could have used the data, nor could they give any other explanation.

Now my GF is having the same problem. Opening Gmail and browsing Facebook for about 5 minutes uses about 40mb. I've seen it with my own eyes. I've also checked her PC. It's set to ask for downloading Windows updates, antivirus updates were done 2 days ago. What the heck could be going on here?

I've been browsing for the last couple of hours on MTN 3G and I've now used 7.3MB in total.

Help?
Click to expand...


Hi Kix

I tend to agree with the next posting about ways of checking your usage and managing your bundle.You can send me the number and i will check your billing.
 
Kix said:
So one of my best friends and also my girlfriend uses Vodacom 3G to connect to the internet. My friend is on a contract and GF is on prepaid.

My friend is on a 125mb package as she uses the internet very sparingly. For the last three months though, she has been getting R2500+ bills from Vodacom. She took her PC and the modem in to Vodacom and they could not find any software on her PC that could have used the data, nor could they give any other explanation.

Now my GF is having the same problem. Opening Gmail and browsing Facebook for about 5 minutes uses about 40mb. I've seen it with my own eyes. I've also checked her PC. It's set to ask for downloading Windows updates, antivirus updates were done 2 days ago. What the heck could be going on here?

I've been browsing for the last couple of hours on MTN 3G and I've now used 7.3MB in total.

Help?
Click to expand...

Swop over to Iburst as soon as possible. They offer a great trouble free service... R200.00 / month for 2GB data - always accumulating. plus free data from midnight to morning. I don't browse on the the cell, because I am a techno goof. Can someone tell me if one can choose a SP eg Iburst on the cell or are you compelled to use the cell phone"s SP- MTN or Vodacom whichever? .
 
Thanks for the replies all.

Like I said, Vodacom themselves checked my friend's PC for data hungry software and they found nothing.

I also had a quick glance at GF's laptop and I could not find anything untoward running in the background.

I am definitely going to give GF my MTN modem and I'm going to take her Vodacom modem and then we'll check if the data usage is still the same.
 
Have you installed something like NetLimiter that gives you a breakdown per application on data usage?
 
Freeusnow said:
Swop over to Iburst as soon as possible. They offer a great trouble free service... R200.00 / month for 2GB data - always accumulating. plus free data from midnight to morning. I don't browse on the the cell, because I am a techno goof. Can someone tell me if one can choose a SP eg Iburst on the cell or are you compelled to use the cell phone"s SP- MTN or Vodacom whichever? .
Click to expand...

Please stay on topic and stop hijacking threads to get your questions answered.
 
Netlimiter is awesome, I would recommend it too. You'll soon see, where that bandwidth is going
 
Well, I was going through some websites for a few minutes when I switced to VMC lite and saw I had done 25MB and was still downloading something at 1MB/sec. I quickly disconnected and decided to check my antivirus firewall activity and only saw that firefox had done 3MB, I don't know where the other 22MB went.

I was checking some rapidshare and megaupload links, making shure they where valid. Only the dialog box poped up but I cancelled the download. This may seem impossible but does Firefox start downloading in advance before I select the download option?
 
Try and use Task Manager to see if any network intensive processers are running in the background.

I found Adobe running background updates sometime ago. Updates should be that big though but maybe something else is doing a similar thing.
 
We have the extact same problem, we use 2G in 2 weeks and hardly go online.
 
Try doing these checks as per one of our forumites earlier on this thread , it might help

Here are some recommendations:
1. Turn off automatic windows updates.
2. Get a good antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-malware program and do a full system scan to make sure there is nothing strange lurking around.
3. Uninstall all unnecessary programs, add-ons, toolbars, etc.
4. What is the chance that your gmail content and facebook content is video intensive? Alot of pictures, video, music may use alot of data.
5. Disconnect from the internet when not actively browsing.
6. Get to know your data use pattern and buy a suitable bundle. e.g I tend to use about 2GB per month - so a 125MB plan wont work for me.
7. Take a good look at your itemised usage - look at the data usage vs time spent connected. Check that the rate per MB is correct as per your tariff plan.
8. My dad also tends to send big pictures/videos/presentations via email - sometimes up to a few MB. Sometimes this fails to send/be recieved. The computer then constantly retries. Every retry results in the upload/download restarting. I guess I'm saying that you should watch the size of your uploads/downloads.
 
Block all unnecessary programs updating using a firewall, thats the most effective way I know
 
Get off contract. Go prepaid, also set the vodacom modem to GPRS/edge only. At least that'll stop you from downloading huge amount of data in such a short time-span.

Get more bandwith, more room to play with.
 
High usage can occur on prepaid or contract , and if you going to switch to slower speeds you will end up downloading the same amount of data in a longer time.
 
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