Tuesday, December 11, 2012
iPhone 5 on ATT network use cellular when on WiFi with a scary rate
I got this bug too: iPhone 5 on AT&T "burns" cellular data on WiFi while idle and locked at approximately 5Mb per hour rate in my case. It started with suden battery drain on Monday, December 3. iPhone was out of juice in 4 hours while in the pocket. It munched on about 20Mb of cellular data.
Contacting AT&T: not helpful. They said they NEVER hear about this. Yeah, right:
Googling this issue revealed that Verison users had this bug:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57523893-94/iphone-wi-fi-glitch-may-affect-users-on-other-carriers/
and as it seems AT&T and other too now.
I talked with Apple care several times and of course they also will not admit the issue :) Surprise.
Do you see pattern here? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4348072?start=105&tstart=0
Do you see pattern here? https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4348072?start=105&tstart=0
As what is nature of bug is not clear.
AT&T suggested : "you installed the app!" and "50Mb per hour is OK. We seen that!"
Apple said to wipe the phone and sync it back.
I spend few days debugging "old image" and turning off all kind of "background" things like iCloud. I must tell - mess. iOS 6 became so bloated with crap - you have to flip many switches to make sure nothing is done behind your back. Bottom line - did not helped. So I wiped.
Interestingly enough it seems to help till I added 3d e-mail account. Then it started to use cellular again. One of the "cool features" is that every time I was using email account, some few K went over cellular.
Apple care again: we come to conclusion to turn LTE off: apparently LTE is evil and 4G/LTE hooping in boundary area some how use cellular data just for search. Megabytes per hour? BS! But OK. It is OFF and for 10 minutes it seems to help. But ... it did not. While in the pocket on WiFi in company it eat another 4Mb or so.
AT&T account show exact correlation - I am billed for all this data.
Called Apple again - long story short - all email is now in Manual. Exchange server admin now is one to blame for this mayhem :)
Celular is ON again - testing...
One more theory is that WiFi modem is off when phone sleeps so cellular is used. This is clearly BS: nothing changed in use pattern that for this phone was under 160Mb a month (it is virtually always on WiFi) and my 4S with more cellular use only use Kbs especially for send - while iPhone 5 use Mb for idle send.
Well, nobody admitting the failure and nobody offer me refund as of yet :)
I keep my fingers crossed for Apple to fix this bug ASAP. It is REALLY very annoying and turns "smartphone" to "stupid phone" again as you can not keep cellular on and you can not trust your device anymore after this crazy outrage.
If you ask me iPhone should be 100% accountable and transparent for data traffic and I should be able to "ban" all underground activity with ONE SWITCH if I must. Let it ask me if I allow application to use cellular internet and for what.
My 4S is Unlimited, but this is not just matter of $: data modem use means battery drain. I so miss iPhone 1 without multitasking and background sync crap :)
Labels: ATT, bug, cellular on WiFi, iPhone 5
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