Does Windows Phone 7 Have a Data Transmission Bug? 202
blarkon writes "Microsoft commentator and Windows Phone 7 Expert Paul Thurrott has reported a serious bug that indicates Windows Phone 7 is uploading up to 50 MB of unidentified data every day. The phone operating system apparently ignores Wi-Fi connections for sending this data, leading some Windows Phone 7 owners hitting their 2 GB plan data limit while doing little more than checking email and social networking sites. Thurrott has written a book on Windows Phone 7 and is unlikely to be making such a claim unless it has some substance. At the moment no one knows what this data contains or where it is going, though Thurrott suspects it may be related to the Windows Phone Marketplace."
Data plan limits are a scam (Score:2, Offtopic)
Imagine if your ISP did this...people would be irate.
Re:Data plan limits are a scam (Score:4, Informative)
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And if you are roaming - make sure to turn off the data comm, you may even need to remove the configuration to be sure that the phone doesn't do data transfer at $10/MB...
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Plan Includes:
* Everything Data Share Plan
* Line 1: $129.99 Minimum Monthly Charge
* Line 2:$0 Monthly Charge
* Lines 3-5: $19.99 Monthly Charge
* 1500 Shared Anytime Minutes
* Unlimited Any Mobile, Anytime
* Total Equipment Protection
* Unl Data/Msg/Amer Roam/Sprint Nav
* Nationwide Long Distance Included
* Unlimited Night & Weekend Mins. Included
* Nights: M-Th 7pm-7am Wknd: F 7pm-M 7am
* Caller ID
*
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Unless you leave the country, international roaming sucks big time.
I live in Sweden and was in the US a while ago. Calls were $3/minute due to roaming fees.
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Oh, *that* kind of roaming... Yea, I'd have to sell a several pints of blood and my first born to pay that bill...
M.
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Yup. And to bring a little more context to "some countries", how about: Canada. The two major providers in the Toronto area are Bell and Rogers, both of which do not offer unlimited plans at all.
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Tip: Rogers' “business-class” Internet does not, AFAIK, enforce a bandwidth limit (and may not even throttle torrents, depending on your region), and it's not much more expensive. Also, should you ever require it, their business-level support is much better than the consumer-level support.
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How about South Africa, where ALL ISP's had capped plans unless you went for "Business ADSL" that was throttled at 1mb/s and only in the last year have uncapped accounts become mainstream.
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Ours did for a long time, but slowly raised the caps until we now have unlimited almost in every package. Shouldn't this be the normal evolution, not the other way around?
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My ISP, Comcast does do this. I have a 250GB limit per month, which I prefer over them killing my torrents at their whim or giving me fake unlimited access. If I need more than 250 I can pay for business class service. That's 100% reasonable.
I'm also with t-mobile which is "unlimited." In other words they throttle me to dial-up speeds for the rest of the month after I had a couple of gigabytes of transfers. Clear "unlimited" does this too. No one is really sure at that point they decide to do this, as its
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I think the only improvement I've seen to ISP performance here is that the cap doesn't exist. Of course without that they haven't been able to figure out how to provide the promised bandwidth.
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Um, most ISPs do this too, they just call it something else :)
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comcast does, 250 GB
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There is a large difference between the available bandwidth a cable company has, and that of a cell company which transmits the majority of it's data wirelessly via satellites/cell towers.
Comcast can afford a 250GB limit, and probably much more. The same cannot be said for most, if not all, cell companies.
Re:Data plan limits are a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
See also: international data roaming.
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If I remember correctly, the EU had put in a law to prevent this.
http://thenextweb.com/eu/2010/03/01/news-eu-law-place-prevent-shock-mobile-internet-phone-bills/ [thenextweb.com]
No idea whether it passed though.
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Re:Data plan limits are a scam (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago I had a basic style flip phone. There were about six buttons on the face of the phone that would connect you to the internet and start racking up data charges with no confirmation. The start page was 500k of pictures and couldn't be changed. You also couldn't block data services from your account and instead had to pay something stupid like ten cents per kilobyte if you didn't have a data plan. So whenever you'd accidentally press a button, or the phone would press it as it was closing (yes, it would accept commands from these buttons if the phone was closed), you'd get about $50 in data fees assessed to your account.
Any attempt to demand that they remove them was met by stonewalling and flat out hanging up on you. I got out of my fees by threatening to take them to court over it, and suddenly they were able to block data services from my account. That didn't stop them from adding extraneous data fees a while later, though, when I had a smart phone with a real data plan. Imagine the shock when I see, "Data plan: $9.99. Data usage: $624.33" on my account because their service sucked so badly.
To be fair, I haven't had any trouble from them since then, and have never actually been forced to pay any of these fees since I threatened legal action..
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This is why I only support companies that provide an unlimited month to month plan (like MetroPCS). The price of their plans, the extent of their coverage (pretty decent nation wide now), and the fact that they have "4G" where I live before anyone else is proof that the other companies are completely reaming their customers.
re: MetroPCS, etc. (Score:2)
I agree with you, except I'm pretty doubtful that MetroPCS *really* allows you to use unlimited amounts of data each month for the flat rate. If you read all the fine print, I'm willing to bet it's just like my Cricket Wireless account -- where "unlimited data" actually means a monthly limit of 2GB per month, that if exceeded, means you get throttled back to very SLOW transfer rates for all your remaining usage until that month is over. You don't get charged any overages though, which is the main thing I'm
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Immix lists unlimited, and it is unlimited. I used over 5gb of data during my laster semester doing remote desktop and a few other things to get my school work done, and it was never throttled nor mentioned to me in any fashion. Typically I'm around the 2gb +/- a few hundred megs
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If your story is true, why on Earth wouldn't you call out the mobile carrier and handset manufacturer by name? It's not like you're a radio announcer and you have to say "a major mobile communications company" -- if somebody screwed you, by all means let everybody know about it. Otherwise what do you expect to change?
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They actually monitor the devices connected to find out what they are and what plan to charge you for. Log into your online account manager and you will see that they know perfectly well which
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While it's one thing to charge people more to discourage excessive data use and maintain your network performance and the like, it's quite another thing to make it part of your business plan to charge unsuspecting users hundreds of dollars when they exceed that cap without realizing it. That's just exploiting people.
This is why AT&T send you a text message at 80%, 90% and 95% of your quota and gives you the option of cutting yourself off instead of getting overages. So they are proactively trying to make sure that you realize what's going on. And at $10/GB for those on the $25 plan, it would be seriously difficult to rack up hundreds of dollars of charges unless you went 500% over your quota.
In other words, what you are describing is exploitative but bears little relation to actual practice. Yes, they did this bull
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The only necessarily wireless part is between the tower and your phone. The tower MAY connect wirelessly to somewhere else, but can also be wired. South Korea has proven that the 2GB limits in the U.S. are laughable.
The cell companies sure do enjoy advertising bandwidth consuming applications, they just don't seem to want to actually deliver on those promises unless you have a bank account the size of Daddy Warbucks. With the new "4G" services, it is quite easy to burn up an entire month's allotment in unde
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imagine if you couldn't use your phone because the network was always full of other people's traffic? People would be irate if this happened (well, more so than on new year's eve for example).
There's a reason for cost-effective plans, and I'm sure the providers will increase the caps over time as they add more capacity, but until they give you more capacity than you need (not forgetting some people use it all, no matter how much you give them) then you'll have to put up with it.
They may also charge you exce
Re:Data plan limits are a scam (Score:5, Informative)
imagine if you couldn't use your phone because the network was always full of other people's traffic?
Imagine people doing that because the phone company advertised that's what you could use it for.
There's a reason for cost-effective plans, and I'm sure the providers will increase the caps over time as they add more capacity...
Hahaha!
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I was going to HAAHAA that comment too; I'm pretty sure ATT went from "unlimited" 5GB/month to 2 tiered plans, one 200MB plan and a 2GB plan.
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If you were on an EDGE connection, that's anywhere from one to eight percent of saturating the pipe (depending on local configuration), and that's just this background traffic. Yeah, that's pretty bad.
"your phone is sending 50Mb..." (Score:2)
User (sounding like Margaret Dumont): Why, good gracious, no!
Microsoft: Well then, would you like to buy some?
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People would be irate
Please refrain from using the term iRate unless used in the proper Apple context.
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Take control of your phones people! They are the greatest anti-fascism device you'll ever own.
Now to get the government to provide anonymous Internet use and direct democracy!
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"50MB is enough to contain a day's worth of audio recording and a full keylog. Spooky."
No shit.
Everyone in this thread is all lathered up over the cost of this data being transmitted but nobody is really asking WHAT this data is.
I stopped using cellphones because, without exception, the cell providers are without a doubt the WORST service providers I have ever been unfortunate enough to do business with. I get better service at Denny's.
That being said, I never really thought too much about the phones being
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No, they are the reality of physics (Score:4, Insightful)
Data limits are a scam. They are a tool for cell companies to suck as much money out of their customers as possible.
They are a reflection of the physical reality that you can only support so many people on a wireless network of any kind. You simply cannot (physically!) have everyone able to use the full bandwidth a phone is capable of, all the time.
You have a lot more of a point in relation to wired networks, but for wireless networks tiered pricing was inevitable once they started being used heavily. AT&T was the first to do so, because they have the cellular network that sees the highest data load.
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No, you are wrong. It is NOT a matter of Physics. It could be at some time in the future but right now it is a matter of greed.
The USA ranks 31st [netindex.com] in the world in average Internet bandwidth. It's not a matter of population density. Do those other 31 countries know something about Physics that we do not? It's not unusual tor cable and telco drones to astroturf such sites claiming that US speeds are "fine". Obviously we have lost our "1st world" Internet status to countries whose standard of living is w
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No, you are wrong. It is NOT a matter of Physics. I
I stopped reading right there.
Because it is most certainly a matter of Physics.
There is a maximum number of handsets a given tower can handle with its assigned spectrum. There is a maximum tower density before they interfere with each other. There is a maximum number of bits [wikipedia.org] you can transfer over a given frequency in a given time frame.
And these maximums are routinely being hit today in many places. Just about any place with an event (ball game, emergency), near most high schools, and entire cities with
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You obviously can't read with comprehension: "cable and telcos". For you translate that as "wired and wireless".
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10 years ago, DSL was 256 kbps, though my home line only tested at 32 kbps so I had to use alternatives (Metricom/Ricochet, SpeedChoice, satellite, cable, etc, tried them all, currently getting 30 mbps on the cable). Now the phone company says they can deliver 7 mbps over my phone line. But they haven't dug up so much as a meter of the streets or replaced so much as a mile of cable in my city in that time (the corporation commission can confirm that). What changed? Physics? Or their willingness to put a
Wireless networks are artificially limited (Score:2)
They could have wireless networks that are 10, or even 100, times greater capacity than they have now. But they don't only because of a "collective" decision to do so. And the phone companies like it that way. An artificial shortage of supply, while generating and driving a higher demand, means they can raise prices and profit.
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Wired communication is like a router and switch - point to point communication. Wireless is like a massive hub... and universe will not allow you to make a wireless switch :)
You can have point to point wireless communications (there are already such devices out there). The difficulty is in having communications beams that you can aim and focus while being able to go through obstacles without killing or damaging stuff ;).
It may be easier if the antennas are bigger, but a large antenna can't fit in a pocket sized device.
That said, it is not always necessary for the antennas to be large on both sides.
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Quite the opposite, actually. I would expect them to decrease over time like everything else in technology. As economies of scale kick in, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to build a cellular site. Therefore, the "we don't have enough cell sites to handle the bandwidth" argument doesn't really fly.
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It's not like it's one nationwide collision domain though! The limit is the size of the cell. Between the cells, you are switching.
Meanwhile, if they're so cramped for space, why are they so busy carpet bombing us with ads for "4G" 30Mbps connectivity so you can watch TV on your cellphone? Truth in advertising (if it was enforced) would demand commercials where the spokesperson crawls out from under a rock covered in slime and says we very nearly approach showing some promise of not sucking too badly! Pleas
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It's funny how 31 other countries manage to do so much better in wireless bandwidth. Are they in a different universe? If so, how do I know about them?
All those 31 countries can fit inside the U.S. probably. Much easier to create a robust, well-managed network in an office building than a city. And so it's easier for Japan (the size of California) than it is for the U.S. If all our cable and wireless providers only had to deal with the west coast, we'd probably see some nice changes.
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With more area comes more customers and so more revenue.
The old saw about density just doesn't play. Low density areas are well served by a low density deployment of cells, high density areas with a high density deployment. What will really matter most of the time both for the quality of the service and the cost of provisioning is customers/cell. U.S. providers are simply charging more and spending less.
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The 'lack' of bandwidth is not a physical limit, it's an investment strategy.
Re:Data plan limits are a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently not. I don't hear any significant mass outcry against this, except from Geeks. I did see a lot of corporate drones spewing corporate propaganda about how the new rules would "keep the Internet neutral". Joe and Sally Sixpack aren't knowledgeable, or concerned enough, to care. Besides, you should know by now that the FCC isn't about protecting the American public from greedy corporations, its about helping those corporations maximize their profits beyond normal returns, after helping those corporations stealing control of what was a tax-payer funded and supported communication facility. The affect of bribing (a.k.a "Campaign Contributions") politicians in Washington was an "AT&T breakup" in reverse. Since FCC chairman are chosen from among ISP management and return to ISP management when their terms expire how could you expect a different result. The situation is the same in all of the regulatory bureaucracies, which is why our Republic has been replaced by a Cabal and the Constitution has been effectively gutted -- all in the name of "Security", of course.
I pay $72/mon for a 12Mb/s guaranteed no-cap connection. That does not include phone or TV. A friend of mine in France pays $30/m for a 40Mb/s connection which includes free calls 24/7/365 to any other phone in France PLUS 200 channels of TV. The difference is greed. I have a fiber optic cable buried in my front yard. It was put there 15 years ago by my city government after it got tired of trying to convince the local cable and telcos to bring highbandwidth to the city. The cable and telcos bribed Congress to outlaw such "unfair competition" and in that Bill Congress gave the cable and telcos $200 Billion to finish what the local governments had started. Unfortunately, the bill did not contain a performance penalty clause, so the cable and telcos pocketed the money and promptly forgot about the fiber optic plans. Now, they are trying to maximize their profits on old Copper wire by trying to "two-tier" packets. The FCC's new rule allows tiering for wireless but not for Copper. The reason is also obvious -- force cable users to wireless, where telcos can squeeze even more profits from users.
In the near future you can expect them to begin charging a monthly fee for each website you visit, along with a monthly data cap. Ten bucks per month for email, for Facebook, per RSS, 25 bucks for YouTube. All with monthly data caps that are so low it guarantees that the users will be pushed into expensive per Mb download charges.
Joe, Sally, by being so stupid you asked for it. Now you are going to get it. Unfortunately, so will the rest of us.
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http://lusfiber.net/ [lusfiber.net]
What you talkin' 'bout? My hometown was quite successful in doing exactly what you claim is now illegal. Are you sure that bill actually exists?
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That is the one reason I wish I still lived in Lafayette (Of course I still own property there, gogo housing market crash). All in all, my time there was fairly well tainted by my employer so I don't really love the place, but the fiber to the home initiative was exciting and interesting. I'm sad that I didn't see it brought to completion. You may recall however that Cox sued to prevent it from happening using the law GP mentioned. Something in the way Lafayette went about it (perhaps using LUS as a fron
Re:Data plan limits are a scam (Score:5, Informative)
Cox sued... BellSouth sued... then several "concerned citizens completely and totally unconnected with Cox or BellSouth, we promise, honest!" sued, as well. I didn't recall them pointing to any specific law, though, just general angst over the whole thing...
The sad thing is I was working in the local government at the time and I know for a fact that the Fiber-to-Home initiative was only started AFTER the local government went to Cox and BellSouth and tried to work out a deal for either one of them to deliver fiber service. Only after they both laughed the government out of their offices did LUS pursue delivering it by itself.
And yeah, that's one of the things that makes me kick myself for leaving Lafayette as well. Especially since the neighborhood my apartment was in was picked as the first for fiber rollout about three months AFTER I left...
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And there's a reason for that. Geeks understand the technology and know where these limits will inevitably lead. Most average people don't have the slightest clue yet. You can bet that when the companies start shaking down their users with a thousand dollar bandwidth bill because they showed a handful of YouTube videos at their holiday party, those average users will throw a fit, but by then it will be too late to fight it because t
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There is a difference between an ISP, in which the last mile data is over copper and fiber, and the cell plan, where the last mile data is over air. If data is carried over copper or fiber, then more cable may be laid to increase band width, or the ISP may buy access to this bandwidth. Since the ISP can generally charge more than these resources cost, t
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Small caps are fine so long as they are clearly advertised as such and the customer has a very easy method of monitoring use.
I'd like to see a dozen tiers so that you can pick one in a range that's useful to you.
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At the moment Verizon is advertising a $30/month unlimited cell data add-on plan for phones on their web site. What they no longer offer is unlimited data plans for non-phones.
It is also worth knowing that there are unadvertised rate plans, which are possible to subscribe to, but some require VZW employee referral, and others require you to know the plan code, which even the sales reps cannot pull up, having been marked to not appear in the searchable plan lists.
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There is a difference between an ISP, in which the last mile data is over copper and fiber, and the cell plan, where the last mile data is over air.
Well said.
And that is the key piece that most just don't comprehend.
The Last Mile is already saturated in many places.
A tower, given our current technology can only handle so many cell phones at once, and the radio frequencies they use are in high demand, and the carrying capacity of each frequency is pretty much fixed by rules of physics.
Freeing broadcast television frequencies was designed to help this somewhat. It will take years before the handset inventory in people's pockets is upgraded to handle thes
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Imagine if your ISP did this...people would be irate.
I think I'd actually prefer it to my "unlimited" plan right now.
Let us pay for a block of data... $X for 2 GB/month. $Y for 4 GB/month. Then provision your networks accordingly. No more of this bullshit where they oversell a segment and everybody gets crappy performance.
Or just charge per byte. Give me a handy tool to meter my use... And let me pay for what I use. Again - provision your networks accordingly and don't oversell the hell out of it.
Either way, I'd be a happier customer.
"Unlimited" sounds
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I would argue that a 4 GB plan should provide 4 GB for a given fee, whether it gets used up over one month or one year. And when that is used up, they should bill you for another 4 GB. And if a download drops midway and has to be restarted from the beginning (or if a page fails to load and requires reloading everything), the phone company should have to eat that cost.
My attitude is that I'm paying a monthly fee that provides up to 5 GB per month and I'm only using a fraction of that, I'm wasting money.
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Wow, you drank a whole barrel of coolaid!
The fundamental limits are in the data RATE, not volume.A network provisioned for X Mbps will cost no less to operate if it isn't used at all and will cost no more if it is maxed 24/7. What we really need is for the ISPs to be forced into truth in advertising. They need to be forced to disclose how much bandwidth is actually provisioned per account (the committed rate).
Personally, I don't want the metering. I'm a bit tired of being nickeled and dimed to death by ever
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Those plans won't be created because there's no way to trick people into being outrageously overcharged.
But with an "unlimited*" plan you can set some limit... it doesn't even have to be secret or anything, because there's generally no convenient way to know how much bandwidth you are using on a phone, and then charge something ludicrous like 3 cents a kilobyte once the user exceeds that limit.
It happened to me and I figured that, very conservatively, the bandwidth I was using on my phone was 4 orders of ma
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What, do you suggest, is a proper provisioning of the network? How is this "bullshit?" If you provision for data, then you're left with a very small number of allowable voice calls. If you provision for voice (it's a phone, why would you do that), then you'll get slow data since all of the channels are occupied with data. Why not upgrade all the towers! Make them able to handle anything! With one tower within three miles of the next, in any direction, that's a pretty massive infrastructure to upgrade, even
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No
Just got myself a smartphone. Android. 100Mb plan (that's the cheapest plan)
Last month, I got 90Mb of usage. And that's 'go wild' usage. (of course, I didn't use tethering)
So yeah, it doesn't bother me. If I go over the usage, I pay, no biggie.
Re:Data plan limits are a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
... until Verizon starts acting like a child and claims that 'unlimited' is not really what you and I understand it to mean...
I have absolutely no trust that the price hikes are in any relation to the total increased cost of the bandwidth. Network upgrades should have been figured into the subscription already, if they claim now it's not sufficient they either underestimated the rise in bandwidth use or just neglected to upgrade the network accordingly... Either way it looks bad for a company whose primary business is communication.
And do you really think the surcharge for overuse is based on any reality of economics besides greed? When you go over your 'pre-agreed' data limit and use some more it's suddenly gold being burned by 3G... To come back to your fast food analogy it would be like getting a single packet of ketchup with your $1,49 fries, and when you finish that and want more the next packet of ketchup will cost you $100.
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I have absolutely no trust that the price hikes are in any relation to the total increased cost of the bandwidth.
Price hikes in the mobile market? Lets see:
/min $0.50 /sms and $30 of credit bought me $30 worth of usage. /min $0.25 /sms and $30 of credit bought me $30 worth of usage, and $60 worth of talk time to customers of the same carrier. (recharged monthly) /min $0.23 /sms and $30 of credit bought me $30 worth of usage, and $60 worth of talk time to customers of the same carrier, and 60 free smses to any carrier. (recharged
1995: Mobile cost me $1.60AU
2000: Mobile cost me $0.90AU
2005: Mobile cost me $0.90AU
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Don't be insulting. Your "unlimited plan" has strings [vzw.com] and strings ("I just wish unlimited data assigned to my account really meant unlimited data!!") and I doubt that you paid $23/m for it.
Verizon is " TESTING [droidinlife.com] unlimited data plans. I currently pay Verizon $72/mo for two cell phones, no texting, no Internet, 1600 minutes. To use the "unlimited" plan for two phones would cost me $160/mo, assuming they aren't lying about being "unlimited" and they throttle my speed when I hit a GB limit.
Right now, follow
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I have a feeling that their claims of "unlimited" would fail in courts, somewhat like the Leonard vs Pepsico case [wikipedia.org]. The judge would probably decide that a reasonable person wouldn't think that unlimited actually means without end, as an "all you can eat" buffet doesn't meaning you can sit there and eat for 8 hours, with the "unlimited" being "within reason".
With their infrastructure problems, give them a little credit though. How could they have predicted that enabling internet access on cell phones would ca
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Woops, this was a reply to thijsh [slashdot.org].
What's so different? (Score:3, Informative)
All of the Winddows OS's have been sending "demographic" data back to Redmond on a regular basis for years. This was throughly documented on the old F**KMicrosoft.com website.
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Re:What's so different? (Score:4, Informative)
The site has been offline for two years, but the Internet Archive has most of it is HERE [archive.org].
Read it and weep. Nothing will be done because most Windows users, like you, prefer to not believe that they are being spied on, or that former Microsoft employee James Plamondon trained "Technical Evangelists" who astroturf websites making fun of such claims.
You should read James Plamondon's mea culpa [live.com] concerning his training of PAID "Technical Evangelists" to do the "Slog", the "Stuffed Panel", Astroturf congress and various websites with pro Microsoft and/or anti-Apple or Linux lies, etc...
Plamondon had to do a mea culpa because his activity was exposed in the Combs vs Microsoft lawsuit where the training documents he wrote were released to the public. As an example of how TE's work, read exerpts from Plamondon's training manual for the phrase "stacked panel", "The Slog", and other techniques here [groklaw.net].
When Joe Barr wrote SLIME in 1994, he didn't know about the TE's Microsoft had unleashed on the world, but he described them to a tea:
http://slated.org/more_microsoft_dirty_tricks_history [slated.org]
Internet Achive has the "SLIME" article here [archive.org].
A more complete, but not exhaustive list of dirty tricks by Microsoft are listed here:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history [grokdoc.net]
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I've read the link you posted. It goes on about "hidden files" that collect "every place you ever surfed on the Internet and all your emails". At that point I already saw where it is coming, but sure enough... the guys have discovered the files which keep IE browsing history. You know, the kind of thing that any browser has had for 15 years now?
As for email, they have also discovered that Outlook uses a database for that, and - as is common with ISAM databases - deleted records are not physically erased rig
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This isn't even remotely true. I've done a lot of work on data leakage (related to propietary information) in dozens of companies, all of which in the Fortune 100. Doing this kind of work from a network-centric perspective (as I did it) involves tracking the relationships between everything...every inbound and outbound packet is analyzed and cataloged. I never once saw demographic data going to Microsoft or anyone else, and certainly not with the consistency that would be present from it happening everyw
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This also seems similar to a story that came out a while back regarding mystery data xfers on the iphone
The iPhone data logs were determined to be daily data usage logs sent to AT&T for billing and for the data stats they provide via text to the user.
Probably not. (Score:3, Informative)
I've had the Samsung Focus since mid-November. I use it heavily for email, browsing, and even the occasional Netflix stream of a TV show. I rarely enable WiFi. I just pulled up my usage on AT&T's website, and I'm averaging about 1GB/month.
Count me as a "No" datapoint in response to Paul Thurrott. Next question, please.
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Ditto, except for the WiFi bit ... I upgraded from an old WM6.5 phone and always left WiFi off there to preserve the battery. With the Focus, I tend to leave it on, so some of my usage has transferred over and I'm down around 500 MB/month rather than my previous 1-2 GB on average.
It should also be noted that AT&T's terminology on their data usage breakdown considers everything as "sent" regardless of the direction of data transfer, since the phone initiated the transaction (as opposed to an incoming tex
#1 suspect: crash dumps (Score:5, Insightful)
Debug code that didn't get turned off or something. 30-50MB bulk uploads in a kinda-regular pattern, and when she turns on airplane mode it seems to save them up.
#2 suspect: somebody found a hole, it's been botted right out of the gate.
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Crash logs is actually not a bad suggestion. Apple do it for iOS apps, but they are uploaded when synced with desktop iTunes. Developers can then inspect them in iTunes Connect.
spycam? (Score:2)
scam in any event. MY data is supposed to be free. YOURS should pay me back.
TCP routing issue probably (Score:2, Interesting)
this looks suspiciously like a routing issue.
The main complaint is data is going over provider wireless when WLAN is available.
If the first part of his forum he comments that it was a download from wap.cingular of 150MB which he feels should have gone through the WLAN.
He's right.. If this is the case they will have to break the network stack out into separate data providers with separate gateways and make sure every program has a priority list of which provider to use since likely there is data send and rec
Man... (Score:5, Funny)
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So they claim.
During the 4th quarter Apple sold 14 million iPhones, and over 73 million to date.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_simple.svg [wikipedia.org]
All your bandwidth are belong to us! (Score:2)
Of course not! (Score:2)
iPhone DejaVu (Score:2)
This would be a case of dejavu for iPhone owners - if there were any that had switched to Windows 7...
This issue came up a while back with the iPhone. Users world-wide on different carriers reported a similar issue. I don't think it was ever fully resolved, but the consensus seemed to be "aggregate billing". That is, the billing system might be aggregating many small sessions during the day and reporting them at the time of "collection" rather than the actual time of use. That is, people were seeing data be
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That was exactly what I thought of when I first read this too. Read the lady's letter. Facebook automatically downloads pictures and updates and she plays a lot of Bejeweled. If FB is caching pictures for her and she has a lot of friends, I could see hitting 30-50MB in a day.
I think you're right that this is a billing system issue. It shows no data use while you were using your phone, and it shows a ton when you're not. It's just coalescing things so you don't have 1200 data charges per day of 2-10kb each.
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To clarify the iPhone situation: the initial reports (on MacRumors) were from people inspecting their billing reports and apparently seeing nightly uploads at 2AM. This varied - mine were around midnight, and perhaps had to do with timezone. Most reports were 2AM, though.
So, I set-up to try to catch the packets. There was not yet any indication that the traffic was going over the cellular network exclusively - just that "something" was being sent nightly at 2AM and people were suspicious - while they slept,
My money's on... (Score:2)
all the marketplace crash logs :)
Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's why spyware would do exactly what is described here, use the 3G and not the Wifi... Because 3G traffic is much harder to capture and inspect...
Harder, but not impossible. All it takes is one hacker to investigate what's in the packets...
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Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to packet-inspect 3G data usage of a closed proprietary OS without provider cooperation...
Even if you had one of those AT&T femtocells, you likely would just see traffic between the femtocell and an AT&T server that handled femtocell traffic and then routed it to the real world.
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Ah, but the femtocell packet inspection is actually a brilliant concept.
The femtocell sits on your normal network, and putting it on a hub makes all of its traffic open to in-house packet inspection. Even if all you got was IP addresses that would be a start.
It may be encrypting traffic it places on the network, but it seems unlikely it would encrypt standard packet structures.
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.. releasing a rubber casing to put around your phone due to the design flaw
well... it worked for apple.
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Or they might mod you down because your post is complete devoid of useful or interesting content...
I would, however, give you a +1 Ironic Sig.