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Help Excessive Data Useage

Have had a brief search around, and read a few threads regarding this issue on other phones. So I will give a brief summary:

HTC Desire HD
O2 - 500mb Data Allowance

Accounts & Sync

Background Data - Off
Manage Accounts
Weather - Syncs every 3 Hours
Stocks - Not running
News - Syncs one a day

Wireless & Networks

Mobile Network Settings
Data Roaming - Off
Enable Always-on Mobile Data - Off

Mail
Update Schedule - Every 15mins

Facebook/Twitter/All that Rubbish - Not running/sync'ing/installed.


So basically, 2 1/2 weeks after receiving the phone, get a nice text from O2 saying "You have used 80% of your data allowance, etc" - Alarm bells started ringing, fortunately found out that I wont get charged if it goes over, but data will slow. Next step - checking my useage on the O2 website.

10MB A DAY!!

Evidently a bit concerned about this, rang O2 to see if they could do anything, nope. Spoke to HTC and spent about 30mins on the phone with them, the guy I was talking to even had a Desire HD (using Facebook, etc) and was struggling to get a couple of MB useage a day. Ran through all the settings and basically had everything off.

They suggested "Advanced Task Killer & Data Switch".

Have ATK running every hour, and point blank refuse to use Data Switch to turn on/off my internet every time I want to check mail, etc.

Had a look online, found out about spare parts.

Installed Spare Parts - had a look and found the figures for "Network Useage - Mail"

My Mail is using 95% of the data, I have 1 Account - updates every 15minutes, and at most I will receive around 20-30 e-mails a day, all of them below the 300kb limit. Even if they were all at 300kb, at a max thats 5-6mb a day.

My data reset on Feb 2nd, this is the breakdown from my O2 account.


Date Usage (kb)

02 Feb 1100:02:18 27916kb
02 Feb 1123:34:29 326kb
03 Feb 1100:57:22 18034kb
03 Feb 1123:34:00 101kb
04 Feb 1100:10:54 6137kb
05 Feb 1100:01:44 19498kb
05 Feb 1123:49:18 328kb
06 Feb 1100:03:58 14296kb
07 Feb 1100:02:42 14801kb
08 Feb 1101:07:12 12142kb

As you can see, thats working at around 27mb a day at the peak, and an average of around 15mb the rest. Thats even higher than what it was last month, and nothing has changed. I was averaging around 10-12mb a day last month, now this and for only checking my e-mail!!

Hopefully someone can help! :(
 
Have had a brief search around, and read a few threads regarding this issue on other phones. So I will give a brief summary:

HTC Desire HD
O2 - 500mb Data Allowance

Accounts & Sync

Background Data - Off
Manage Accounts
Weather - Syncs every 3 Hours
Stocks - Not running
News - Syncs one a day

Wireless & Networks

Mobile Network Settings
Data Roaming - Off
Enable Always-on Mobile Data - Off

Mail
Update Schedule - Every 15mins

Facebook/Twitter/All that Rubbish - Not running/sync'ing/installed.


So basically, 2 1/2 weeks after receiving the phone, get a nice text from O2 saying "You have used 80% of your data allowance, etc" - Alarm bells started ringing, fortunately found out that I wont get charged if it goes over, but data will slow. Next step - checking my useage on the O2 website.

10MB A DAY!!

Evidently a bit concerned about this, rang O2 to see if they could do anything, nope. Spoke to HTC and spent about 30mins on the phone with them, the guy I was talking to even had a Desire HD (using Facebook, etc) and was struggling to get a couple of MB useage a day. Ran through all the settings and basically had everything off.

They suggested "Advanced Task Killer & Data Switch".

Have ATK running every hour, and point blank refuse to use Data Switch to turn on/off my internet every time I want to check mail, etc.

Had a look online, found out about spare parts.

Installed Spare Parts - had a look and found the figures for "Network Useage - Mail"

My Mail is using 95% of the data, I have 1 Account - updates every 15minutes, and at most I will receive around 20-30 e-mails a day, all of them below the 300kb limit. Even if they were all at 300kb, at a max thats 5-6mb a day.

My data reset on Feb 2nd, this is the breakdown from my O2 account.


Date Usage (kb)

02 Feb 1100:02:18 27916kb
02 Feb 1123:34:29 326kb
03 Feb 1100:57:22 18034kb
03 Feb 1123:34:00 101kb
04 Feb 1100:10:54 6137kb
05 Feb 1100:01:44 19498kb
05 Feb 1123:49:18 328kb
06 Feb 1100:03:58 14296kb
07 Feb 1100:02:42 14801kb
08 Feb 1101:07:12 12142kb

As you can see, thats working at around 27mb a day at the peak, and an average of around 15mb the rest. Thats even higher than what it was last month, and nothing has changed. I was averaging around 10-12mb a day last month, now this and for only checking my e-mail!!

Hopefully someone can help! :(

Hi there.

Can you say what kind of mail system / application you are using?

Even though your emails are not that large, if your phone is the one performing a check (aka. not push from a server), and connecting to a server every 15 mins, that will be a few 100's Kb every 15 min. (the 100's Kb varies, depending on your email connection type. And this is bits, not bytes. Divide bits by 8 to get bytes). Now thats 4 times an hour, times 24 hours a day, thats 96 times a day that your phone check for emails. 1 check can be about 0.1 MB I'd estimate. Thats roughly 10 MB just on your email checks alone. Then comes your email downloads and other widget/apps syncs.

Thus I'd recommend using some kind of a push server system for your emails. If you are using a POP3 system, your phone is the one that initiates the contact every 15 min, and that can quickly become a lot :)

Hope that explanation helps
 
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Hi there.

Can you say what kind of mail system / application you are using?

Even though your emails are not that large, if your phone is the one performing a check (aka. not push from a server), and connecting to a server every 15 mins, that will be a few 100's Kb every 15 min. (the 100's Kb varies, depending on your email connection type. And this is bits, not bytes. Divide bits by 8 to get bytes). Now thats 4 times an hour, times 24 hours a day, thats 96 times a day that your phone check for emails. 1 check can be about 0.1 MB I'd estimate. Thats roughly 10 MB just on your email checks alone. Then comes your email downloads and other widget/apps syncs.

Thus I'd recommend using some kind of a push server system for your emails. If you are using a POP3 system, your phone is the one that initiates the contact every 15 min, and that can quickly become a lot :)

Hope that explanation helps


Hi, thanks for the reply.

I am using the standard "Mail" system that comes with the phone, would another download-able application be better?

I had a look around regarding the number of updates per day, I will try every 30minutes, but I did have it set as this before and did not notice a difference.

Its at the point, where if I make the phone any more unuseable, it becomes pointless.
 
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Well, how about forwarding your emails to a Gmail account, and using the Gmail system? As far as I have noticed, Gmail uses push (although I have not actually read this anywhere, but when I get a new email on Gmail, it usually appears on my phone within seconds).

This will mean the "checks" will stop, and the phone will only download email information it actually needs, as the Gmail server is the one that contacts your phone, instead of the other way around :D
 
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Gardium,

I will give it a try, I do appreciate the help.

Seems like one of those things though that will solve the problem, but the issue shouldnt be there in the first place. For instance on my iPhone3G, I had 2 e-mail accounts both running on 30min updates, and it didnt come close to the amount of data im using.

The help is appreciated though.
 
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Gardium,

I will give it a try, I do appreciate the help.

Seems like one of those things though that will solve the problem, but the issue shouldnt be there in the first place. For instance on my iPhone3G, I had 2 e-mail accounts both running on 30min updates, and it didnt come close to the amount of data im using.

The help is appreciated though.

Yes. I see what you mean that the problem shouldn't be there, compared to the experience you have had.

However, with RIM (and maybe Apple? I'm not an Apple fan :p, so never really used one. Got a friend with iPhone 4, but never asked him about the setup) the phone uses a push system, that the company behind the phone provides. This enables the phone to download the emails as they come. The server provided will setup a push link between your email and it. When the server gets a new email, it will connect it to the phone. But if the system isn't 100% push, but a "checker" (i.e. to see if you have new emails), the amount of data needed to contact that server is very little (i.e. this type of server has your credentials stored, when your phone pings it with a ID, the server will connect to your email to check for you and give a response). However, with Android (if you are using a POP3 system), it's a whole different story, as Android does not have its own email push/"checker" system. Thus it becomes a considerable extra amount of data needed to establish a connection with your email server (i.e. the data to be uploaded is your password, user data, etc, etc.).

But if you are a business person of some kind (as you seem to be receiving many emails daily, and need to be able to keep in touch every 15 mins), maybe you could contact your company IT techs, and see if there is a push server for emails that they offer. This will help you considerably in terms of data usage :)

Hope it works out ;)
 
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I had days of 150 MB! Don't even know what caused it. Still inquiring, of course I didn't rand Voda, no point. I installed 3g Watchdog in order to keep an eye on the data consumption but didn't happen again. I usually get thru 20-30 MB/ day on the network, my phone is connected to WiFi 80% of the running time and STILL eat-up 20 MB.
I have Gmail, 2 email accounts with the original client, Twitter refreshed at 15 mins, weather, Google Reader (this one eats 0,5 - 1 MB daily), some browsing, messaging, etc. Pretty happy overall.
 
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