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huge data overages occurring on many computers

Not only have I had over 10 gigs used in 4 days, but friends of mine have had the same problem in the last week. We only do email and google searches. Verizon denies everything. I think Verizon should check their satellites and own up to it. Wish there was a way for all of us with unknown overages to get together and force them to look into it.

Comments

flutterfly8498

Are you using a jetpack, usb, or connecting via mobile hotspot on your smartphone? If it's a jetpack, and you don't turn it off completely when not using it, the computer might still be drawing data for email or other updates like your antivirus.

halo79

A little clarification would be nice. What kind of connection are you using? Is it a mobile hotspot on a phone or jetpack or usb modem?

Keep in mind, pC use a lot of data and depending on the configuration of your pc settings, the PC could auto updating applications on your system in the background. Anti virus is one but any app nowadays connect to check for updates. Windows auto updates itself and those are LARGE files as much as 5GB at times. Make sure nothing is set to auto update.

As for satellites, wireless carriers use cellular towers to transmit services to their mobile devices.

Again if you could provide more info so the forum can help you figure out what is causing the data usage that would be just awesome!

matseprof

I had a similar problem this month. It took me a while to figure out that one of our computers was indeed exchanging huge amounts of data over the internet (I say "exchange" because both out-going and in-coming data were large) whenever the computer was turned on. (You can monitor that traffic by looking at the status of the network connection.) I thought at first there might be a trojan but Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes didn't report any problems. The problem went away, however, when I ran CCleaner and turned off any program that I didn't fully trust from starting up automatically when the computer starts or the browser is launched. Unfortunately, I don't know which program was causing the problem.

Bunny-225

Over the past few months I have had friends running Verizon Jetpacks, Mifi devices, and who use their smartphones on a ‘hotspot’ option on their plan having this same mystifying problem. In periods of just a couple of hours as they were simply sitting on their computers browsing the Web or reading email, they would run through multiple Gigabytes(!) of data. Two of them ran completely over their data limit without even being aware. Verizon was really quite fair with them and extended their data without penalty, but I knew there had to be some reason for this unexplained behavior. Also, it was NOT bogus data reporting as we actually witnessed the usage in real time on their device. Completely shutting the device or computer down was the only way of stopping it once it began.

Finally with all of us working together I think we’ve found at least OUR problem. It was Garmin software downloaded and installed on the computers to update Garmin GPS vehicle navigation devices they’d purchased at Costco, etc. The Garmin software apparently will randomly begin downloading MEGA amounts of data when it sees a network connection, and if the user does not have some type of data monitoring software (BitMeter2, for example) running in the background to let them know this is occurring, huge amounts of data can be consumed in very short times. In the cases of my friends (3 different people/computers), all have uninstalled their Garmin software and the problem seems to have stopped.

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