Help sudden huge data bursts for no reason?

[bp13]

I have the 3G slide with unlimited data which I use lightly. I check e-mail on it less than once a day. Same for Facebook -- maybe a few times a week I'll take a quick look at something. I map a location every so often. My data usage has been something like 200 or 300 MB a month.

Tonight I get a text from TMobile saying my data is thru the roof (over 5400 MB), only halfway into the billing cycle, and they tell me they're slowing me way down.

Since my data usage has not changed ***at all*** this is a mystery. I went online to see the data usage, to see what it's doing. About a week ago, suddenly there are weird data bursts, like 100, 200, 300 MB all at once (when before, almost everything was less than 1 MB).

For instance, today I used my data once, at about 11 am, to map an address where I was meeting my friend. I opened the Internet app, googled the address, saw it on the map, and closed the app. I was online for a minute or two at most. The data for that was supposedly 170-something MB -- almost as much data as I used the entire previous month. That's just wrong.

Then, a couple of hours later, while I was sitting at lunch with my friend, with my phone asleep in my purse, there was a burst of another couple hundred. It was right about that same time that a text from my husband came in. Possibly that "woke up" the phone for a few seconds, and all I can guess is, in that short time when the phone woke up, the phone was trying to "do something" that used tons of data.

I talked to ***four*** customer service people tonight (got transferred from person to person and explained the problem four times). They can't tell me what's wrong, what's supposedly using all this data, why looking at a map for a few seconds suddenly counts for a month's worth of activity.

No, I'm not using the phone as a modem. No, I'm not downloading tons of things. No, I'm not watching YouTube. I don't think I've used the phone to watch a video since the day I bought it. Whenever I'm at home, the phone is on my home WiFi, where it's using ***zero*** data.

The phone is hot a lot of the time, and the battery has started dying reeeeally quickly. Something is wrong.


Most of these data bursts seem to occur when I leave the house (i.e., I've just left the WiFi and it switches itself over to 3G and apparently tries to do...something that uses tons of data) but in those cases I'm never using the phone. I'm in the car with my phone in my purse, and apparently the phone is going insane.

I've removed any apps that the phone will allow me to remove, except for my app killer, which I've been using often, but that doesn't seem to make any difference.

It's like the phone is possessed, and no one at TMobile can or will help me.


So I searched on here, discovered the *#*#4636#*#* trick for checking "Network Usage" and the huge user is "Google" -- well that narrows it down haha right?


It says



bytes received 84550
bytes sent 67495776



packages sharing this UID:
Gmail storage
Google Apps
Google Search Enhanced
Google Settings Provider
Google Talk Service
Google Talk Storage
com.google.android.syncadapters.contacts


Since google is like, what the phone runs on, I have no idea how to solve this problem. Thanks for any help. Seriously!!!

 

[trav2001]

Does it have this problem if you reboot the phone? Have you tried to do a master reset?

 

[bp13]

Hi, and thanks for the reply. I was trying to avoid the reset, because I wasn't sure what I would have lost.

My problem seems to have resolved itself, and I'll post what happened, in case it might help someone else.

The problem started the day after my daughter's birthday. I started asking myself, "What was I doing with the phone, specifically, anything google-related?"

Then I remembered, I had tried to e-mail about 50 photos to my main email account, using the gmail feature of the phone. I basically never use my gmail for anything else, and on that occasion, the photos never went through.

I ended up using my ymail app to do the same thing, and it worked fine, and I forgot about the missing photos from gmail.

So then yesterday, I went on my laptop, and went to my gmail account, to see if I could tell if those pics were still trying to get through, or if there was some way to suspend it. Nothing -- couldn't find a thing. But my gmail was open for maybe half an hour.

Then -- coincidence? I think not! -- my main email account received all those pics from my gmail account and my phone thereafter stopped going crazy with the data. I ended up being so very proud of myself for "solving" the problem, even though really I did nothing but log on to gmail from a computer.

If this happens to anyone else, all I can advise is, open your gmail from a computer and see if the problem will clear itself out.

If anyone has an explanation as to *why* this all might have happened, I'd be very interested to know it.

 

[trav2001]

The only reason i can think of is trying to send way to much data overf a 3g network in a single email...when u logged onto gmail on a broadband connection it may have taken over the transfer of the pics...but i may be totally wrong.