Vampire cellular data... why? How to stop?

[rrr12]

Hi. New to forum. I have an iphone4, on Consumer Cellular (Att is the actual carrier). Very basic iPhone user here. I rarely use cellular data features, but yet I see lots of data transferred every day at 6am, 12 noon and 6pm.

Without me using any data features, I see 150MB or more each month due to this vampire data transfer. It appears to be increasing each month as far as I can tell. I'm on a small data plan (150MB per month), but without using any data features, I many times go over the limit. Arg!

I attached a screenshot of my data usage for the past 20 days. The total for these 20 days is about 100MB.

If the phone is off at 6am, noon or 6pm, I will not see any data usage. Looks like the phone is automatically synching up with the network at these times? Is this really necessary? or just a revenue boost for Att? Any other reason this could be happening?

I'd like to keep my phone on all day long (for phone calls and texts). To stop this vampire auto data transfer from happening, I could turn my phone off at these times during the day, or manually turn off/on cellular in the iPhone setup to avoid these times. Both are painful options (needing to remember to do it 3 times each day is not something I should have to do manually...better things to do with my time...)

Any other solutions? Something automated would be nice ;-)
thanks

 

[rrr12]

If anyone sees this thread...
I called Consumer Cellular. They claim that the times listed in their usage reports (6am, noon and 6pm) have nothing to do with the actual time of data transfers. At 6am, noon and 6pm there is a 'summary report' created for the past 6-12hrs of data usage. They tell me that there is no way to tell the actual time of data transfers.

They suggest I just keep 'cellular data' = off on the iPhone to avoid apps, etc from using data. Not a convenient solution... but it'll have to do.

I found this article useful:
http://appletoolbox.com/2014/10/control-limit-cellular-data-use-iphone-ipad/

 

[filmbufs]

If anyone sees this thread...
I called Consumer Cellular. They claim that the times listed in their usage reports (6am, noon and 6pm) have nothing to do with the actual time of data transfers. At 6am, noon and 6pm there is a 'summary report' created for the past 6-12hrs of data usage. They tell me that there is no way to tell the actual time of data transfers.

They suggest I just keep 'cellular data' = off on the iPhone to avoid apps, etc from using data. Not a convenient solution... but it'll have to do.

I found this article useful:
http://appletoolbox.com/2014/10/control-limit-cellular-data-use-iphone-ipad/

Thanks for the original post and the article. Both were very useful!

Reading through the posts, it looks like quite a few people are controlling their data issue by doing this:

1) Settings>General>iCloud>Documents & Data... Scroll down and have the customer turn off Use¿Cellular Data
2) Settings>iTunes & App Store> Scroll down to AUTOMATIC DOWNLOADS and have the customer turn off MUSIC, APPS, UPDATES
3) Settings>General>Background App Refresh (turn off any apps that the customer doesn't want to automatically refresh with their information)
4) Settings>Privacy>Location Services (the customer will see all the apps that have the GPS enabled(Everything should be turned off except Setting Time Zone)