Data usage through the roof!
primalspirit
Newbie

My Galaxy Nexus was stolen around Christmas, and I received a replacement through Assurion, the insurance carrier Verizon uses.  Since then my data usage has gone from less than one gig per month to ... well ... now I am over 6 gigs and heading towards 7, with still a week left on my month.  When I look at the details of my data usage, there are huge chunks of data for times that I am asleep, or using the phone how I generally use it, which is surfing the web, email, etc. 


I have spent hours with customer service.  This last time I got a Tier 2 technical support person who agreed that I'm not using my phone in ways that would rack up large chunks of data.  He suggested that I reset my phone, which he said would restore it to factory presets.  I did so, although if it is reset to factory presets why are my apps still there?  I'm still getting huge blocks of data usage when I am not doing anything different.  I don't stream or upload/download anything or use my phone in ways that would use such large chunks of data.  I have disabled background data on all programs, which I never needed to do before, and that doesn't address the problem.

I am at my wit's end, as I really can't afford to spend an extra $40 month on data, yet I need my phone for work. 

Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.

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Ann154
Community Leader
Community Leader

Is there any pattern to the usage? An application with high data usage?

Have you considered turning off the cellular data connection when you are connected to a wifi network to see if that helps?

I'm most definitely NOT a VZW employee. If a post answered your question, please mark it as the answer.

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primalspirit
Newbie

Thanks for responding!

I don't see any pattern at all, just random huge chunks of data. 

Where I use my phone there is no wifi available, so that is not a possibility.

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Ann154
Community Leader
Community Leader

Can you post a screenshot of your data usage screen particularly for that month of usage?

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primalspirit
Newbie

I'm attaching two data captures.

The first is the most recent activity, with a large chunk going through around 5:00 pm.

The second has a data chunk on 1/19 of 600 mb going through at a time when I can verify that I was sound asleep in any US timezone.

My phone has been turned off since around 11:00 last night.  I still have some data being used with the phone off, although they are small amounts.

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Ann154
Community Leader
Community Leader

Actually, what I was asking for was something like this.

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primalspirit
Newbie

Oh, I see.  Can you tell me how to take a screenshot of my phone?

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Ann154
Community Leader
Community Leader

Hold both the power button and the volume down button at the same time pressing in to create the screenshot.

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primalspirit
Newbie

Okay, here are the 4 overlapping shots:

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Ann154
Community Leader
Community Leader

The only thing I see on those is you are in the Google Play Store quite a bit.

What about the previous month or two?  You can change the date of the billing cycle to view the last couple of months data usage.  Especially for the month where you had the high usage.

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primalspirit
Newbie

I don't do much in Google Play store, but since I had to reinstall programs on the new phone that must be what used up data.  I check my data all the time and it never shows more than 150 mb in a one week period. 

I have used the phone the same way for prior months and never had close to 1 G of use.  Use climbed to 3G last month when I got the new phone.  Now it is 6G this month.  What can possibly be happening? Why is my phone showing 137 mb of data used this month, and when I look at data usage details on the website there are 200 - 600 mb sessions happening sporadically? 

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Ann154
Community Leader
Community Leader

So your usage on the phone doesn't match the usage listed for the same billing period on your MyVerizon account?

Edit:  For example, my current billing cycle does match up fairly closely.

Usage Type:Gigabytes (GB)Megabytes (MB)Kilobytes (KB)
My Usage:0.967990.4491,014,219.570
Total Usage:0.967990.4491,014,219.570

Message was edited by: Ann154

I'm most definitely NOT a VZW employee. If a post answered your question, please mark it as the answer.

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primalspirit
Newbie

Thanks for looking into this with me.

I just got off the phone with another tier 2 tech support person who said there appears to be an issue with the calculator on the website, and that I had only used 350 MB not 6 G (quite a difference!).  He needs to look into it this week, but at least there's hope of getting the issue resolved.

Will write back if this isn't the end of it.  Thanks again!

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