iPhone and Data Plan Overages
Have you noticed you've been using a lot more of your data plan lately? Perhaps like me you have a limited data plan (we have 15GB shared amongst our family members) and you're being billed for overages as you get near the end of the month or you have an unlimited plan but one that throttles you once you hit a certain amount of data usage.
More and more lately we have been getting billed for overages. Last month we had 3 of them (at $15 per 1GB each time) so I called AT&T about it. They suspected that when at home, there were too many devices for the AT&T fiber modem to handle. They said the limit is something like 15 or 20 and that after that devices get kicked off. Thus, their theory was that without realizing it our cell phones, even when at home, were not always on WIFI. To solve this problem, I bought a Netgear Orbi router (about $300) that can handle up to 255 devices. It would give us better wifi coverage at home and if it solves the problem, great.
It didn't. We have had 5 overages this month, one just minutes before our data plan would have renewed. It didn't make any sense. We had several overages in the past day or so, some coming just an hour or so after the last one. Our daughter is in Korea (where her phone has the cellular option turned off), our son was at home and both my wife and I were out together, neither using our phones to surf the web, watch YouTube or do any of the other activities that cause one's phone to use data like water from a fire hose.
Or so we thought. This morning I logged in to our account on the AT&T website. It's not obvious but there's a tool that can show you every phone call and every cellular data usage. Since my wife's phone had suddenly shot the top of the list in terms of data usage, I focused on hers. In the late hours of yesterday evening there was significant data usage. How could this be? I was playing a gig with my band and she was there watching me. As I suddenly realized this morning the source of the problem: my wife was shooting video of my band with her iPhone and that video was being synced in the background to iCloud. iCloud Photo Library is a great feature but not one I want my iPhone using over cellular. Fortunately, there's an easy solution to this problem.
Go to the Settings app.
Scroll down to Photos and tap it.
Scroll down to Cellular Data and tap it.
Turn off the Cellular Data option.
This will prevent Photos from syncing with iCloud Photo Library over cellular, saving your data plan from overages. It appears this feature is on by default which is surprising. The thing that upsets me is that AT&T knows we have iPhones and likely knows that this could be causing the overages and yet never suggested this was the problem. When an overage occurs, it would have been nice of them to point this out. We would have turned off this feature a long time ago had we known about it. AT&T does provide tips on how to avoid going over your data limit but they are obvious and not specific to a particular smartphone platform.
So if you're an iPhone user and you've been using too much of your data plan lately, check to see if you are syncing your photos over cellular. If you are, the remedy is fortunately an easy one.