My recent iPhone experience with the AT&T network has netted me having only a sampling of what busy call center operators experience--which I posted about in Corking the iPhone. The sneaky use of our other cell phone’s text messaging feature to send ads for ring tones was another discovery I posted in: Cellular Bills: Who Pays For Marketing to You?
Even though our Apple iPhone data "plans" are unlimited data usage, I noted that my iPhone data usage varies from 24-58 MB.
(February 2010-July 2010)
What threw me off was the data usage noted at odd times--2:15 am on several days and then other times that I knew I wasn’t using the iPhone during early morning hours. When I reviewed the bills and data usage again, the data traffic shows "OUTGOING."
The AT&T support agent initially concluded that the data traffic was valid and was from applications updating on my iPhone. iPhone updates require action from the user by pressing the App Store icon and then updating the iPhone. The iPhone software is updated by synching the iPhone with the computer. I had no updates.
My unimpressive inventory is just nine iPhone apps. YPMobile and Wikipanion I rarely use. STPhaser is a Star Trek game, HAL 9000 is a collection of recordings of Hal the computer from 2001 A Space Odyssey and Star Blaster is a 99-cent phaser/tricorder that I use especially to rouse our dog and mostly annoy our teenage daughter. Open Table gets me dinning reservations and the Compass app is legitimate because when we use un-scaled floor plans in buildings for take offs--we need to show a bearing. "Meet" is a Cisco app that I rarely use, as is RDP, to remotely support our campus customers.
So the nine apps had me wondering about the traffic they supposedly generate just to update. I deleted Cisco Meet, RDP, Wikipanion and YPMobile to see what impact this would have on my data usage and I did this back before the next bill cycling. The previous month (June 2010) my data usage was 57.7 MB and after deleting the four apps, my data usage declined to 43 MB (July, 2010). Once again, the data usage shown on the billing is for "OUTGOING" and most of the time stamps are during wee hours of the morning. I decided to wait it out another month; not shown on the graph is data usage for August 2010, and usage increased to 49.8 MB. (I had one iPhone update). Again, I waited another month and September 2010 usage declined to 38.6MB.
When I wrote Corking the iPhone, I really thought AT&T would quickly find resolution to the initial problems of getting calls for 501 (Arkansas) numbers. Instead, it's been a comedy of phone calls, repeating over and over the same information, numbers, times and other data. I’ve spoken with "experts" from various locations and groups at AT&T and while they all seem to think it’s spoofing, none of them has offered a fix other than to change my number. What ended up changing was talking to the collection agency looking for a person in Arkansas that kept reaching me via my iPhone. Since AT&T techs lost the data I collected by playing AT&T Operator, a different tech called and requested if I could help. I contacted the call center that was using the predictive dialer to hunt down some dead beat in Arkansas and getting me instead, and they were taken aback. After realizing I was a warm body and wasn’t prank calling, they helped me out in an exchange of information. Next, I notified the AT&T tech in Georgia and within a week all calls destined for various numbers in 501 stopped ringing my cell. AT&T did credit my bills for all the 501 calls too. The problem? Level 3 Communications issue. What’s interesting is my new and current bill for October (billing cycle) shows the data usage only at 18.6MB.
Whatever platform you end up using other than human-ware--it must be able to track changes to each sub account and validate services and charges. Whenever I call mine, they automatically seem to review my long list of issues and routinely have come to expect that I’m not calling with good news. The other evening, news reports blasted Verizon Wireless for over-billing data usage to some reporter’s kid’s cell phone. My data plan is unlimited. I cannot account for my data usage and I’m not even going to try and I'm no longer going to constrain my choice of apps either. Hopefully our bills will remain in check.
