Smart phone data usage (Page 2)

AT&T does the same thing.  I've got the 250MB plan ($25).  If I go over, the next 250MB is $25, etc.  Sure, the 2GB plan is only $10/month more, but I stay at about 50MB/month - wifi at work, wifi at home.

I've had an iPhone and been on AT&T since the iPhone 2.  I have never gone over 2GB are rarely go over 1GB.  I am a HEAVY user.  However most of my usage is web browsing, email, FB, Twitter etc..  I imagine if you steam a LOT of video it could be an issue but it would be a LOT of video.

Hop on WiFi whenever you can and it'll help a lot.

I had the unlimited plan on 3 phone and dropped it.  I put the extra $15 (5x3) towards a family texting plan (unlimited).

Pandora?  Youtube?

If she streams video on the bus every day for all 40 minutes, she could easily break 2GB/month.  Audio would be close, but audio 90% of the time and video 10% would probably do it too.

I know that it uses a lot of power, it drains the battery rather quickly.  Not sure about the data part but i would imagine so.

Chances are she has some app (or more than one) that is always on in the background chewing up bits and bytes.

I would stay far, far away from a limited data plan, especially with AT&T!

I had a group of four that were on Sprint. I looked over the bills and the most anyone had ever used was 75mb in one month on Palm Pre's and HTC Android phones. We are all definitely not "power users".

So we went to AT&T, got iPhones and went with the 200mb plan as that should have been plenty given our past usage. I decided to monitor the bill for the first few weeks to make sure everything was going okay. Within 4 days of opening the account one of the four phones had gone over 200mb. I am on wifi at work and wifi at home, within 7 days I had used more than half of my 200mb limit, and I had been careful to not do a thing on 3g.

I looked at the bill and found that there were all sorts of phantom uploads on the bill. For instance, every night at 12:48am my wife's phone would upload anywhere from 12 to 50mbs. My phone would upload between 3 and 10mb every night at about 10:30pm. These are times where we were in bed in our house which has wifi.

I did some reading online and found that this is a widespread issue, AT&T says, tough, get the 2GB plan. But I also read numerous accounts of people who had AT&T unlimited, looked at their bill, never went over 500mb so switched to the 2GB, and every month after the switch they were consistently pushing their 2gb limit.

Needless to say I took all four phones back, got my money back, went straight to Verizon and signed up for the unlimited plan. Oddly enough we don't use near the data on these iPhones as we did in those two weeks on AT&T and we are not being careful at all about usage on the Verizon phones. No more phantom uploads every night either.

My experience is that there is something fishy going on with AT&T. But even without that issue, as new apps come out and phones become even more useful, I would hate to miss the opportunity to have an unlimited plan in case the usage goes up in the future. Verizon still has the unlimited plan for now so now is the time to get it.

How in the world did you get an iPhone 4G????  I want one!!!!

I don't think you can.  There is no Iphone 4G, there is an iPhone 4 which is new but it is 3G

Sorry, I mean iPhone 4.  D'oh.