Does Windows Phone 7 Have a Data Transmission Bug?

blarkon writes "Microsoft commentator and Windows Phone 7 Expert Paul Thurrott has reported a serious bug that indicates Windows Phone 7 is uploading up to 50 MB of unidentified data every day. The phone operating system apparently ignores Wi-Fi connections for sending this data, leading some Windows Phone 7 owners hitting their 2 GB plan data limit while doing little more than checking email and social networking sites. Thurrott has written a book on Windows Phone 7 and is unlikely to be making such a claim unless it has some substance. At the moment no one knows what this data contains or where it is going, though Thurrott suspects it may be related to the Windows Phone Marketplace."

Comments

Data plan limits are a scam

[digitaldc]

Yes, I said it. Data limits are a scam. They are a tool for cell companies to suck as much money out of their customers as possible.

Imagine if your ISP did this...people would be irate.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[yincrash]

in some countries, ISPs do actually do this.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[hedwards]

They used to do that. I remember when I was first looking at broadband a decade or so ago, it was typical for DSL providers to have a cap of 1 or 2 gigabytes per month included.

I think the only improvement I've seen to ISP performance here is that the cap doesn't exist. Of course without that they haven't been able to figure out how to provide the promised bandwidth.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[The MAZZTer]

I thought plenty of ISPs DID do this already.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean they don't already? Or are you just being ironic...

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[volxdragon]

Um, most ISPs do this too, they just call it something else :)

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[jaymz666]

comcast does, 250 GB

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[intellitech]

There is a large difference between the available bandwidth a cable company has, and that of a cell company which transmits the majority of it's data wirelessly via satellites/cell towers.

Comcast can afford a 250GB limit, and probably much more. The same cannot be said for most, if not all, cell companies.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[gbjbaanb]

imagine if you couldn't use your phone because the network was always full of other people's traffic? People would be irate if this happened (well, more so than on new year's eve for example).

There's a reason for cost-effective plans, and I'm sure the providers will increase the caps over time as they add more capacity, but until they give you more capacity than you need (not forgetting some people use it all, no matter how much you give them) then you'll have to put up with it.

They may also charge you excessive amounts for the extra usage, and that's a money-grabbing scam, but the fact that limits are there is not anything a sensible person should consider out of the ordinary.

Now, that your phone is sending 50Mb (fifty f***ing MB!) of data every day - that's shocking. That's truly shocking, how much xml crap does MS need to put in there? Have they forgotten that data is expensive and you can't treat as mobile phone like a desktop permanently connected to a Gb LAN? Software is so sloppy nowadays, I couldn't even think what 50MB of update/info data looks like.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[FooAtWFU]

While it's one thing to charge people more to discourage excessive data use and maintain your network performance and the like, it's quite another thing to make it part of your business plan to charge unsuspecting users hundreds of dollars when they exceed that cap without realizing it. That's just exploiting people.

See also: international data roaming.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[thijsh]

Tell me about it, my unlimited plan used to be just that, unlimited. But now my provider (Vodafone) tries to sell extra packages and started sending letters when I hit just the 700Mb mark claiming 'fair use'... The new packages come as 'bandwidth' upgrades to the basic package, you'd better pay up those extra 10 euro miniumum otherwise when you do nothing you will suddenly get a bill of hundreds of euro's for the excess bandwidth... I calculated I would pay like 80x the money if I don't act, and 3x the money if I buy into the extortion scam.

They try to push the price-hike by whining with arguments that the network is flooded by smartphones from people that actually use bandwidth they pay for... But the stupidest part is that at the same time they advertise their new network packages with ads where people use their smartphone for all bandwidth intensive applications and claim 'Our network is ready for it'. Fuck them and their dirty tactics! When my subscription expires I'm so outta there, I'm willing to accept a lesser network just to make the point.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

imagine if you couldn't use your phone because the network was always full of other people's traffic?

Imagine people doing that because the phone company advertised that's what you could use it for.

There's a reason for cost-effective plans, and I'm sure the providers will increase the caps over time as they add more capacity...

Hahaha!

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

They do but it depends on where you are (legality of caps) and who your ISP is. For example, I am on Comcast in the US and 250 GB is their cap. I have routinely seen posts from Canadian slashdotters who have a lower cap, but I forget which specific ISPs - I certainly cannot state whether it is all of them or not.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Haedrian]

If I remember correctly, the EU had put in a law to prevent this.

http://thenextweb.com/eu/2010/03/01/news-eu-law-place-prevent-shock-mobile-internet-phone-bills/

No idea whether it passed though.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[windcask]

Stop acting like a child. Companies have to make profit margins in order to have to be profitable. You don't see a "office janitorial surcharge" on your bill, do you? The total sum of operating expenses for a company are figured into billing, not just solely the use of your device itself. This is why you'll pay $1.19 for a drink at a fast food restaurant that costs them 3 cents to make, but you'll basically pay at cost for your burger and fries.

If you disagree with your cell provider's business practices, you can always go back to a land line.
 
...or you can pay 23 bucks a month for an unlimited plan like I do at Verizon.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Jerry]

Apparently not. I don't hear any significant mass outcry against this, except from Geeks. I did see a lot of corporate drones spewing corporate propaganda about how the new rules would "keep the Internet neutral". Joe and Sally Sixpack aren't knowledgeable, or concerned enough, to care. Besides, you should know by now that the FCC isn't about protecting the American public from greedy corporations, its about helping those corporations maximize their profits beyond normal returns, after helping those corporations stealing control of what was a tax-payer funded and supported communication facility. The affect of bribing (a.k.a "Campaign Contributions") politicians in Washington was an "AT&T breakup" in reverse. Since FCC chairman are chosen from among ISP management and return to ISP management when their terms expire how could you expect a different result. The situation is the same in all of the regulatory bureaucracies, which is why our Republic has been replaced by a Cabal and the Constitution has been effectively gutted -- all in the name of "Security", of course.

I pay $72/mon for a 12Mb/s guaranteed no-cap connection. That does not include phone or TV. A friend of mine in France pays $30/m for a 40Mb/s connection which includes free calls 24/7/365 to any other phone in France PLUS 200 channels of TV. The difference is greed. I have a fiber optic cable buried in my front yard. It was put there 15 years ago by my city government after it got tired of trying to convince the local cable and telcos to bring highbandwidth to the city. The cable and telcos bribed Congress to outlaw such "unfair competition" and in that Bill Congress gave the cable and telcos $200 Billion to finish what the local governments had started. Unfortunately, the bill did not contain a performance penalty clause, so the cable and telcos pocketed the money and promptly forgot about the fiber optic plans. Now, they are trying to maximize their profits on old Copper wire by trying to "two-tier" packets. The FCC's new rule allows tiering for wireless but not for Copper. The reason is also obvious -- force cable users to wireless, where telcos can squeeze even more profits from users.

In the near future you can expect them to begin charging a monthly fee for each website you visit, along with a monthly data cap. Ten bucks per month for email, for Facebook, per RSS, 25 bucks for YouTube. All with monthly data caps that are so low it guarantees that the users will be pushed into expensive per Mb download charges.

Joe, Sally, by being so stupid you asked for it. Now you are going to get it. Unfortunately, so will the rest of us.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[fermion]

Small limits, like 200 MB are a scam. Large limits are somewhat defensible. If I had say 5 GB of data a month on a cell plan, that would not be do bad.

There is a difference between an ISP, in which the last mile data is over copper and fiber, and the cell plan, where the last mile data is over air. If data is carried over copper or fiber, then more cable may be laid to increase band width, or the ISP may buy access to this bandwidth. Since the ISP can generally charge more than these resources cost, there is little reason to limit bandwidth, as those that use little bandwidth will subsidize the cost of the that use a lot. Two people, one who check email and sufs the web, the other constantly downloading content, kind of cancels out. Both pay the same amount, the former pays the bill for the later, that is kind of the scam.

Over the air resources are more limited, which is why the public owns the airwaves, and in the US the FCC regulates their use. Cable can't be laid to increase the bandwidth, and more advance solutions are expensive. Each person who pays should have the same access rights to the air waves. If one person wants to download movies 24 hours a day, say hundreds of GB a month, that may mean that I do not a quick connection to check my email. While I do not mind subsidizing someone else's need for constant p0rn, I do mind when I cannot do what I need to do.

A long time ago when we did not have the land based bandwidth we do now a similar restriction was in place. Casual users of the then new internet were asks not heavy use of it during the day. I am not kidding. Resources were tight, many severs had other uses during the day, so most of us played at night. It was not a big deal. We just lived with it until the infrastructure got build out.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[thijsh]

...or you can pay 23 bucks a month for an unlimited plan like I do at Verizon.

... until Verizon starts acting like a child and claims that 'unlimited' is not really what you and I understand it to mean...

I have absolutely no trust that the price hikes are in any relation to the total increased cost of the bandwidth. Network upgrades should have been figured into the subscription already, if they claim now it's not sufficient they either underestimated the rise in bandwidth use or just neglected to upgrade the network accordingly... Either way it looks bad for a company whose primary business is communication.

And do you really think the surcharge for overuse is based on any reality of economics besides greed? When you go over your 'pre-agreed' data limit and use some more it's suddenly gold being burned by 3G... To come back to your fast food analogy it would be like getting a single packet of ketchup with your $1,49 fries, and when you finish that and want more the next packet of ketchup will cost you $100.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Chibi Merrow]

The cable and telcos bribed Congress to outlaw such "unfair competition" and in that Bill Congress gave the cable and telcos $200 Billion to finish what the local governments had started.

http://lusfiber.net/

What you talkin' 'bout? My hometown was quite successful in doing exactly what you claim is now illegal. Are you sure that bill actually exists?

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[weeb0]

That is why you cannot have the information about the minutes spend and the data transferred directly on the cell phone ...

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Renraku]

A few years ago I had a basic style flip phone. There were about six buttons on the face of the phone that would connect you to the internet and start racking up data charges with no confirmation. The start page was 500k of pictures and couldn't be changed. You also couldn't block data services from your account and instead had to pay something stupid like ten cents per kilobyte if you didn't have a data plan. So whenever you'd accidentally press a button, or the phone would press it as it was closing (yes, it would accept commands from these buttons if the phone was closed), you'd get about $50 in data fees assessed to your account.

Any attempt to demand that they remove them was met by stonewalling and flat out hanging up on you. I got out of my fees by threatening to take them to court over it, and suddenly they were able to block data services from my account. That didn't stop them from adding extraneous data fees a while later, though, when I had a smart phone with a real data plan. Imagine the shock when I see, "Data plan: $9.99. Data usage: $624.33" on my account because their service sucked so badly.

To be fair, I haven't had any trouble from them since then, and have never actually been forced to pay any of these fees since I threatened legal action..

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[dgatwood]

Now, that your phone is sending 50Mb (fifty f***ing MB!) of data every day - that's shocking.

If you were on an EDGE connection, that's anywhere from one to eight percent of saturating the pipe (depending on local configuration), and that's just this background traffic. Yeah, that's pretty bad.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Z00L00K]

And if you are roaming - make sure to turn off the data comm, you may even need to remove the configuration to be sure that the phone doesn't do data transfer at $10/MB...

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Ephemeriis]

Imagine if your ISP did this...people would be irate.

I think I'd actually prefer it to my "unlimited" plan right now.

Let us pay for a block of data... $X for 2 GB/month. $Y for 4 GB/month. Then provision your networks accordingly. No more of this bullshit where they oversell a segment and everybody gets crappy performance.

Or just charge per byte. Give me a handy tool to meter my use... And let me pay for what I use. Again - provision your networks accordingly and don't oversell the hell out of it.

Either way, I'd be a happier customer.

"Unlimited" sounds nice - but it doesn't exist. There are limits. And I'd rather know where the limits are than trip over them in the dark.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon cellular data plans are not unlimited - not a one.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[dgatwood]

I don't hear any significant mass outcry against this, except from Geeks.

And there's a reason for that. Geeks understand the technology and know where these limits will inevitably lead. Most average people don't have the slightest clue yet. You can bet that when the companies start shaking down their users with a thousand dollar bandwidth bill because they showed a handful of YouTube videos at their holiday party, those average users will throw a fit, but by then it will be too late to fight it because the policies will be entrenched, and after all, nobody complained for the first two years, so the system must be okay. That's why it is our responsibility as geeks to pitch a fit at the top of our lungs and scream until Congress listens.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[nomel]

This is why I only support companies that provide an unlimited month to month plan (like MetroPCS). The price of their plans, the extent of their coverage (pretty decent nation wide now), and the fact that they have "4G" where I live before anyone else is proof that the other companies are completely reaming their customers.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Comcast can afford a 250GB limit, and probably much more. The same cannot be said for most, if not all, cell companies.

If the cell companies spent more of their profits on upgrading their networks they wouldn't have that problem. The only reason they have much lower limits is greed. Comcast is greedy too just not as bad.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[dgatwood]

I would argue that a 4 GB plan should provide 4 GB for a given fee, whether it gets used up over one month or one year. And when that is used up, they should bill you for another 4 GB. And if a download drops midway and has to be restarted from the beginning (or if a page fails to load and requires reloading everything), the phone company should have to eat that cost.

My attitude is that I'm paying a monthly fee that provides up to 5 GB per month and I'm only using a fraction of that, I'm wasting money. Thus, I might as well find a way to max it out every month.

The flip side of this is that if customers were routinely forced to pay rates based on usage, it would significantly drive down demand on smart phones, and the carriers make a hefty profit on those, hence they aren't likely to do that any time soon. In effect, the carriers want to eat their cake and still have it. It is in their best interest to entice people with unlimited service, then say, "Oh, but we didn't really mean it." They want people to buy the expensive smart phones so that they can make a huge profit on them, but then they want people to use them like they would use ordinary phones. The real world doesn't work that way, and this is starting to become painfully obvious to the telcos.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[karnal]

I was going to HAAHAA that comment too; I'm pretty sure ATT went from "unlimited" 5GB/month to 2 tiered plans, one 200MB plan and a 2GB plan.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if your ISP did this...people would be irate.

where do you live? most ISPs in the united states do this.
also, most ISPs and cellphone service providers alike aren't "making money" from the people, as you can't pay more for higher cap. and you don't get charged for going over.... they just slow your connection down to a crawl until your billing period resets.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Jerry]

Don't be insulting. Your "unlimited plan" has strings and strings ("I just wish unlimited data assigned to my account really meant unlimited data!!") and I doubt that you paid $23/m for it.

Verizon is " TESTING unlimited data plans. I currently pay Verizon $72/mo for two cell phones, no texting, no Internet, 1600 minutes. To use the "unlimited" plan for two phones would cost me $160/mo, assuming they aren't lying about being "unlimited" and they throttle my speed when I hit a GB limit.

Right now, following the new FCC "neutrality" policy becoming law, using a cell phone to access the Internet does not look attractive unless you make in excess of $150K/year so you can afford it.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[screwzloos]

My ISP does do this. Then again, Alaskans don't seem to know any different. Not that we have any choice in the matter. Our internets really are tubes.

http://www.gci.com/for-home/alaskas-fastest-internet

You think Comcast or AT&T are bad?

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[iONiUM]

Yup. And to bring a little more context to "some countries", how about: Canada. The two major providers in the Toronto area are Bell and Rogers, both of which do not offer unlimited plans at all.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[sjames]

The only necessarily wireless part is between the tower and your phone. The tower MAY connect wirelessly to somewhere else, but can also be wired. South Korea has proven that the 2GB limits in the U.S. are laughable.

The cell companies sure do enjoy advertising bandwidth consuming applications, they just don't seem to want to actually deliver on those promises unless you have a bank account the size of Daddy Warbucks. With the new "4G" services, it is quite easy to burn up an entire month's allotment in under an hour.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[icebraining]

Ours did for a long time, but slowly raised the caps until we now have unlimited almost in every package. Shouldn't this be the normal evolution, not the other way around?

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Sepodati]

Small caps are fine so long as they are clearly advertised as such and the customer has a very easy method of monitoring use.

I'd like to see a dozen tiers so that you can pick one in a range that's useful to you.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[DrgnDancer]

That is the one reason I wish I still lived in Lafayette (Of course I still own property there, gogo housing market crash). All in all, my time there was fairly well tainted by my employer so I don't really love the place, but the fiber to the home initiative was exciting and interesting. I'm sad that I didn't see it brought to completion. You may recall however that Cox sued to prevent it from happening using the law GP mentioned. Something in the way Lafayette went about it (perhaps using LUS as a front) allowed them to do it anyway.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

This might happen when there is competition between ISPs but once they have all the customers they can possibly have they start thinking up ways to milk more out of the existing ones.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[sjames]

Wow, you drank a whole barrel of coolaid!

The fundamental limits are in the data RATE, not volume.A network provisioned for X Mbps will cost no less to operate if it isn't used at all and will cost no more if it is maxed 24/7. What we really need is for the ISPs to be forced into truth in advertising. They need to be forced to disclose how much bandwidth is actually provisioned per account (the committed rate).

Personally, I don't want the metering. I'm a bit tired of being nickeled and dimed to death by everyone and his dog. All the overhead for the metering billing and accounting for all this crap is eating a significant chunk of productivity in this country. It's a crazy amount of overhead (imagine that, bean counters count the marginal cost of absolutely EVERYTHING except for bean counting). What I want is a committed rate and the option to pay in advance for a higher committed rate. I want to know the cost up front and to not have to think about it any further. I've got more interesting things to do.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Chibi Merrow]

Cox sued... BellSouth sued... then several "concerned citizens completely and totally unconnected with Cox or BellSouth, we promise, honest!" sued, as well. I didn't recall them pointing to any specific law, though, just general angst over the whole thing...

The sad thing is I was working in the local government at the time and I know for a fact that the Fiber-to-Home initiative was only started AFTER the local government went to Cox and BellSouth and tried to work out a deal for either one of them to deliver fiber service. Only after they both laughed the government out of their offices did LUS pursue delivering it by itself.

And yeah, that's one of the things that makes me kick myself for leaving Lafayette as well. Especially since the neighborhood my apartment was in was picked as the first for fiber rollout about three months AFTER I left...

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[ConceptJunkie]

Those plans won't be created because there's no way to trick people into being outrageously overcharged.

But with an "unlimited*" plan you can set some limit... it doesn't even have to be secret or anything, because there's generally no convenient way to know how much bandwidth you are using on a phone, and then charge something ludicrous like 3 cents a kilobyte once the user exceeds that limit.

It happened to me and I figured that, very conservatively, the bandwidth I was using on my phone was 4 orders of magnitude more expensive than by FIOS connection.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[icebike]

There is a difference between an ISP, in which the last mile data is over copper and fiber, and the cell plan, where the last mile data is over air.

Well said.

And that is the key piece that most just don't comprehend.

The Last Mile is already saturated in many places.

A tower, given our current technology can only handle so many cell phones at once, and the radio frequencies they use are in high demand, and the carrying capacity of each frequency is pretty much fixed by rules of physics.

Freeing broadcast television frequencies was designed to help this somewhat. It will take years before the handset inventory in people's pockets is upgraded to handle these new frequencies. But even then the frequencies freed up by TV broadcast are great for building penetration and range, but worse than current 3G frequencies for total data carrying capacity/data rates.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Teun]

People would be irate

Please refrain from using the term iRate unless used in the proper Apple context.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[JamesP]

No

Just got myself a smartphone. Android. 100Mb plan (that's the cheapest plan)

Last month, I got 90Mb of usage. And that's 'go wild' usage. (of course, I didn't use tethering)

So yeah, it doesn't bother me. If I go over the usage, I pay, no biggie.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Deliveranc3]

50MB is enough to contain a day's worth of audio recording and a full keylog. Spooky.

Take control of your phones people! They are the greatest anti-fascism device you'll ever own.

Now to get the government to provide anonymous Internet use and direct democracy!

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[gad_zuki!]

My ISP, Comcast does do this. I have a 250GB limit per month, which I prefer over them killing my torrents at their whim or giving me fake unlimited access. If I need more than 250 I can pay for business class service. That's 100% reasonable.

I'm also with t-mobile which is "unlimited." In other words they throttle me to dial-up speeds for the rest of the month after I had a couple of gigabytes of transfers. Clear "unlimited" does this too. No one is really sure at that point they decide to do this, as its dynamic, so you can't even plan ahead.

I'd much rather have a reasonable limit that is disclosed upfront than fake unlimited. In fact, I'd support legislation that forced them to read limits and throttling policies in all ads and print details in all web/print ads. The lack of transparency in the cellular world is the real problem, not limits per se.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[babywhiz]

Those phones that 'require a data plan' ... again, bogus. My daughter got a Samsung Captivate Galaxy S. Nice phone for her...anyway, it required a 'media plan' to function. I told em to hook up w/ the same as the rest (2gb limit)..the 30$ package. ATT) I got my bill, and the phone, that 'required' a media package had ran the whole month on the 'pay as you go' data plan, instead of being converted over.....so yea....not only are the limits a scam, but the damn phone works without a 'media' plan....

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm grandfathered in with the original unlimited Apple plan. Not sure if I'll have to alter that when my contact expires.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Mr. DOS]

Tip: Rogers' “business-class” Internet does not, AFAIK, enforce a bandwidth limit (and may not even throttle torrents, depending on your region), and it's not much more expensive. Also, should you ever require it, their business-level support is much better than the consumer-level support.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[AndGodSed]

How about South Africa, where ALL ISP's had capped plans unless you went for "Business ADSL" that was throttled at 1mb/s and only in the last year have uncapped accounts become mainstream.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Wrath0fb0b]

While it's one thing to charge people more to discourage excessive data use and maintain your network performance and the like, it's quite another thing to make it part of your business plan to charge unsuspecting users hundreds of dollars when they exceed that cap without realizing it. That's just exploiting people.

This is why AT&T send you a text message at 80%, 90% and 95% of your quota and gives you the option of cutting yourself off instead of getting overages. So they are proactively trying to make sure that you realize what's going on. And at $10/GB for those on the $25 plan, it would be seriously difficult to rack up hundreds of dollars of charges unless you went 500% over your quota.

In other words, what you are describing is exploitative but bears little relation to actual practice. Yes, they did this bullshit in 2008 but they don't any more AFAICT.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[thegarbz]

I have absolutely no trust that the price hikes are in any relation to the total increased cost of the bandwidth.

Price hikes in the mobile market? Lets see:

1995: Mobile cost me $1.60AU /min $0.50 /sms and $30 of credit bought me $30 worth of usage.
2000: Mobile cost me $0.90AU /min $0.25 /sms and $30 of credit bought me $30 worth of usage, and $60 worth of talk time to customers of the same carrier. (recharged monthly)
2005: Mobile cost me $0.90AU /min $0.23 /sms and $30 of credit bought me $30 worth of usage, and $60 worth of talk time to customers of the same carrier, and 60 free smses to any carrier. (recharged monthly)
2010: Mobile costs me $0.90AU /min $0.23 / sms and $30 of credit bought me $180 worth of generic usage, free calls to all customers of the same carrier, free social network access, 200MB worth of data, and covers the 2 year contractual cost of a HTC Legend.

I still think many mobile phone plans are overpriced, but as far as price hikes go, I don't see it. In fact as networks have been upgraded to support 3G and improve coverage the cost of owning a mobile phone has dramatically reduced over the past 15 years. All the while the phone you get on your standard 2 year contract has gotten better to the point where you can now get a basic android smartphone.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that your analogy sucks ass. Packets of ketchup aren't delivered over a terrible wireless network with limited bandwidth and funky transmission problems due to various issues they can and/or cannot control. For a wired network, it's different. The capability is there and most of the time you don't need to enforce bandwidth limits. When you deliver ketchup over wireless using satellites, it's different.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

In the near future you can expect them to begin charging a monthly fee for each website you visit, along with a monthly data cap. Ten bucks per month for email, for Facebook, per RSS, 25 bucks for YouTube. All with monthly data caps that are so low it guarantees that the users will be pushed into expensive per Mb download charges.

Joe, Sally, by being so stupid you asked for it. Now you are going to get it. Unfortunately, so will the rest of us.

Huh yeah, and Americans didn't land on the moon. Idiot.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anachragnome]

"50MB is enough to contain a day's worth of audio recording and a full keylog. Spooky."

No shit.

Everyone in this thread is all lathered up over the cost of this data being transmitted but nobody is really asking WHAT this data is.

I stopped using cellphones because, without exception, the cell providers are without a doubt the WORST service providers I have ever been unfortunate enough to do business with. I get better service at Denny's.

That being said, I never really thought too much about the phones being used in pretty much the same manner as Facebook--a data scrounging device.

Just what, exactly, is being sent? Hell, 50MB is enough to send a full days worth of low-res video, sound, GPS data as well as an inventory of data stored on the phone. As it appears now, Microsoft is charging customers to be spied upon.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[natehoy]

Verizon hasn't published an uncapped data plan in at least two years. So if you have a $23 a month unlimited plan, you're grandfathered into it and it's impossible for anyone to take your advise, or you know some secret handshake that gives you access to a data plan.

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/mobilebroadband/?page=plans

If you know of a plan that Verizon is still offering, could you tell me how to get it, please?

I'd defect to Verizon in a heartbeat if they offered an uncapped data plan at that price. I know of at least two people who would happily urinate on their iPhones in public if it meant going to an unlimited data plan on any half-decent handset. But Verizon's data plans are basically modeled after AT&T's and vice versa, so the prices and caps aren't very different.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[PCM2]

If your story is true, why on Earth wouldn't you call out the mobile carrier and handset manufacturer by name? It's not like you're a radio announcer and you have to say "a major mobile communications company" -- if somebody screwed you, by all means let everybody know about it. Otherwise what do you expect to change?

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[natehoy]

It also surprises me sometimes that the overages cost so much more per gigabyte than the base plan does.

Verizon's cell data plan is 2GB for $20. That's a decent price, and not a completely unacceptable cap. But their overage is $20 per gigabyte. That's their one and only smartphone/featurephone plan. So if I use 3GB a month on one phone, that's the same as 4GB would cost me if I had two phones at 2GB each. If I used 4GB a month, I'm paying $60 a month, enough to have three data plans.

AT&T's DataPro 2GB plan is $25 a month, but overages are at $10/GB, which means it's a little better, but their laptop data plan overages are five and ten cents a megabyte, which works out to $50 or $100 a gigabyte. If you buy their 5GB $60 plan and go a gigabyte over, it's $110. If you buy their 200MB $35 plan and use 1GB over, it's $135! It's far cheaper to buy a basic phone and tether it if you need over 5GB a month...

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[nomel]

I have a feeling that their claims of "unlimited" would fail in courts, somewhat like the Leonard vs Pepsico case. The judge would probably decide that a reasonable person wouldn't think that unlimited actually means without end, as an "all you can eat" buffet doesn't meaning you can sit there and eat for 8 hours, with the "unlimited" being "within reason".

With their infrastructure problems, give them a little credit though. How could they have predicted that enabling internet access on cell phones would cause people to transfer data? How could they have known that increasing the access speeds to this internet would cause more demand on the towers? This is the real world, not "we have an intelligent business roadmap that lets us predict and plan for future requirements" land.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[nomel]

Woops, this was a reply to thijsh.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Unless you're with Sprint. Here's my plan:

Plan Includes:

* Everything Data Share Plan
* Line 1: $129.99 Minimum Monthly Charge
* Line 2:$0 Monthly Charge
* Lines 3-5: $19.99 Monthly Charge
* 1500 Shared Anytime Minutes
* Unlimited Any Mobile, Anytime
* Total Equipment Protection
* Unl Data/Msg/Amer Roam/Sprint Nav
* Nationwide Long Distance Included
* Unlimited Night & Weekend Mins. Included
* Nights: M-Th 7pm-7am Wknd: F 7pm-M 7am
* Caller ID
* Call Waiting
* Three-Way Calling
* Voicemail


$155.80 a month for three phones with full unlimited everything, early evening start, unlimited mobile to mobile (*ANY* carrier), unlimited data - and that also includes roaming. Hard to beat!


M.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's 'us geeks' who actually enjoy reading things like 'A Brave New World' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' who see the similarities in the direction Society is going.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Z00L00K]

Unless you leave the country, international roaming sucks big time.

I live in Sweden and was in the US a while ago. Calls were $3/minute due to roaming fees.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Unless you leave the country, international roaming sucks big time.

Oh, *that* kind of roaming... Yea, I'd have to sell a several pints of blood and my first born to pay that bill...


M.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[windcask]

I have absolutely no trust that the price hikes are in any relation to the total increased cost of the bandwidth.

Nobody asks you to trust. Vote with your wallet: Take your business elsewhere, or abstain. Or bitch to your local legislature that private companies needs to open up their financials to public scrutiny.

Network upgrades should have been figured into the subscription already, if they claim now it's not sufficient they either underestimated the rise in bandwidth use or just neglected to upgrade the network accordingly...

Well I'm so glad you know better than the board of directors how to run their company. Has anyone offered you a job yet?

And do you really think the surcharge for overuse is based on any reality of economics besides greed?

Yes. Even the most dark-hearted, bitter liberals have to admit that companies have payrolls, and making more money allows them to employ more people and pay the ones they do have a better wage. Except for unions, of course. Furthermore, if the increases are based on greed, why didn't they use those charges before then? Because it never occurred to them before that people could pay for data? Come on.

When you go over your 'pre-agreed' data limit and use some more it's suddenly gold being burned by 3G... To come back to your fast food analogy it would be like getting a single packet of ketchup with your $1,49 fries, and when you finish that and want more the next packet of ketchup will cost you $100.

Then I guess you'd better use less ketchup. Or go to the other restaurant down the street that gives it to you for free.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[ElKry]

Oh, sure it runs without a data plan. But, from experience, AT&T can, and probably will, suddenly send a nice SMS with a smiley face telling you that they have detected you are using a smartphone, and have happily changed your plan to the smartphone one, without any interaction on your side other than using it.

They actually monitor the devices connected to find out what they are and what plan to charge you for. Log into your online account manager and you will see that they know perfectly well which phone you're using, as it show right there, usually with a picture. And if you call support while not having the right plan, they will happily tell you that they changed it during the call to the right plan for your phone.

This happened to me while using a 2g iPhone and again after getting a Nexus One.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[windcask]

Then I must be the luckiest guy in the world. When I signed up, I had two options: 150 megs or unlimited. I chose the latter. If they throttle me down after 5 gigs or whatever I'm okay with that, as long as they don't charge me for it.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[windcask]

Don't be insulting. Your "unlimited plan" has strings [vzw.com] and strings ("I just wish unlimited data assigned to my account really meant unlimited data!!") and I doubt that you paid $23/m for it.

I really do pay $23/month for it...but it's normally $30. I get a business discount. If they want to throttle me back after 5 gigs or whatever, that's fine...as long as they don't charge me for it. I won't ever hit that anyway.

Verizon is " TESTING [droidinlife.com] unlimited data plans. I currently pay Verizon $72/mo for two cell phones, no texting, no Internet, 1600 minutes. To use the "unlimited" plan for two phones would cost me $160/mo, assuming they aren't lying about being "unlimited" and they throttle my speed when I hit a GB limit.

I pay around $200 for a family plan with 4 Androids and 1 cheapie. 700 minutes (we mostly call each other, so we rarely even approach half that), unlimited texting, unlimited data for me, 150 megs for the other three Androids. I get a business discount. I'm not bullshitting you; I bought my phones online and they asked me what data package I wanted. $23 for me, $15 for the other three.

I'd show you my bill, but the truth is I honestly don't care that much if you believe me or not.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[nomel]

What, do you suggest, is a proper provisioning of the network? How is this "bullshit?" If you provision for data, then you're left with a very small number of allowable voice calls. If you provision for voice (it's a phone, why would you do that), then you'll get slow data since all of the channels are occupied with data. Why not upgrade all the towers! Make them able to handle anything! With one tower within three miles of the next, in any direction, that's a pretty massive infrastructure to upgrade, even if a single city, for a very small percentage of people that use massive amounts of data compared to an "average" user. Unless the average masses, the ones bringing in the money, complain, what's the point? It would literally be throwing away money, throwing it right into the hole where the peak user resides. Why not keep the masses happy and punish those ruining the experience for everyone else?

They'll upgrade when the average person starts approaching the data cap, regularly, causing customers to leave, giving economic intensive to upgrade. It's business..it's about making maximal amounts of money for maximal growth to achieve maximal profits...it's why they exist. If you don't like the model, then try out a different one, like metropcs...which is also oversubscribed, but at least it's flat fee month to month, and they seem to be using their money to expand and provide better service (first 4g provider in my area).

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[windcask]

$23/month with business discount. It's normally 30 with my Android. See my response to "Jerry" for details.

I have a Motorola Droid X, for the record.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[jrumney]

Unfortunately the new EU law only covers roaming within EU borders. If you travel beyond the EU, you're still in for a shock when your bill arrives, especially if you leave data switched on. An international data plan helps, but watch the limits, they tend to be very low.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Tacvek]

At the moment Verizon is advertising a $30/month unlimited cell data add-on plan for phones on their web site. What they no longer offer is unlimited data plans for non-phones.

It is also worth knowing that there are unadvertised rate plans, which are possible to subscribe to, but some require VZW employee referral, and others require you to know the plan code, which even the sales reps cannot pull up, having been marked to not appear in the searchable plan lists.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[tautog]

How about South Africa, where ALL ISP's had capped plans unless you went for "Business ADSL" that was throttled at 1mb/s and only in the last year have uncapped accounts become mainstream.

imagines line of people reaching to Strait of Gibralter passing usb flash drives hand to hand

I guess you have to draw the line on bandwidth usage somewhere... ;-)

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[TangoMargarine]

Which company do you avoid if they are all evil bastards? /zen

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[babywhiz]

They seemed perfectly content letting those "data per use" charges rack up without telling me' till I went to pay the bill. Over $200 worth on that phone that if I was the type to pay without looking, they would have been more than happy to keep letting them rack up.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Nyder]

in some countries, ISPs do actually do this.

Like in the United States of America?

I'm shocked, I really am.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Douglas Goodall]

It is not about data particularly, but phone minutes. A few years ago I was having some financial problems and I had some creditors calling me constantly on my cell phone trying to collect. When I saw I as approaching my limit, I shut off the phone for the rest of the month. Then I received a bill for hundreds of dollars in overages because the provider was charging me air time while callers were leaving voicemail. I called the provider and asked what I could do to prevent this, and all they could recommend was closing my account, which of course would cause a $175 early termination fee. I found a new provider after that, although one is very much like another, as we all know.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[ElKry]

Well, yes. They're more than happy to keep you on a plan that is (potentially) more expensive than the one they would put you in. The automatic changes happen when, for example, you change from an iPhone 2g grandfathered into a $20 data plan (EDGE), to a different phone (in my case a Nexus One, t-mobile 3g frequency type as I needed it to have the European frequencies, so it can only do EDGE on at&t) that they think should use the more expensive $30 plan that includes 3G data (even if the phone can only do EDGE on their network).

Even before that, I had my iPhone 2g (unlocked) running on their network without a data plan, with the gprs/edge data disabled to not get any accidental charges, using only data from wifi. After a while, they decided that because I was using an iPhone, I *had* to have a data plan, even if (and probably because) I wasn't using any data at all. I'm sure if I had been on pay-as-you-go and had astronomical bills, they wouldn't have said anything.

I never thought I would look forward so much to deal with the european wireless carriers again, and it really is like going back to your mildly abusive husband that at least won't burn your eyeballs with cigarettes like the new one did.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[dakohli]

I have a phone with Rogers Canada. They provide an App both for Android and the iPhone. It is very clear on how much data/voice/Text has been used. It will also tell you your next bill, and give you your billing dates.

We love to complain about our providers, but in this case I have had very few complaints with Rogers. Their discount brand Fido also has the same app. The only issue with it is that you have to be on 3g for it to work. But they don't charge for that data.

I have a 6G data plan, and have never even approached exceeding it. I can tether, but I don't have to very often.

Dave

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[totally bogus dude]

I would argue that a 4 GB plan should provide 4 GB for a given fee, whether it gets used up over one month or one year. And when that is used up, they should bill you for another 4 GB.

The main reason for having clear quotas is to allow the ISP to estimate for bandwidth usage. As another poster said, it's not the total volume that really matters, but the peak rate of data flow. By saying "you can download up to X GB this month", over a large number of customers, you get fairly predictable usage patterns. If you say "you can download X GB whenever you like" to a large number of customers, you get very difficult to predict usage patterns, which means that provisioning sufficient bandwidth for peak usage becomes difficult.

The 'ideal' solution would be for the ISP to provide a real-time view of their available capacity on each of their transit links, and for users to self-regulate their traffic. If the usage is below say 50%, then you can download as much as you like for no fee. As the utilisation increases, those who have already used a lot of bandwidth get a lower quality of service, unless they pay an increasing fee for "premium" bandwidth. That way, if you're a low usage type of customer, you can just use the internet whenever you want and get full speeds. If you're a high usage type of customer, you can monitor the available capacity and reduce your usage during peak periods, go nuts during low usage periods, and pay a low fee. Or, you can pay heaps and go nuts all the time.

The reason that solution won't work is because most people wouldn't be able to understand what the heck was going on, and many of those who did understand it really can't be bothered with that kind of micromanagement. So, a periodic quota provides a kind of in-between point which is easy enough for users to understand (especially if you provide nice graphs and such) and which also gives the bandwidth provider a reasonable stable and predictable usage pattern.

And if a download drops midway and has to be restarted from the beginning (or if a page fails to load and requires reloading everything), the phone company should have to eat that cost.

The problem with this is that it's difficult to identify who's at fault if a download drops. Why should your phone company have to pay more because you're trying to download from a site that's unreliable and keeps dropping offline? What if the download failed due to user error, e.g. moving outside of the service area during it? What's more, even if you do manage to establish clear rules, trying to prove whose fault it actually was after the fact will be very difficult.

My attitude is that I'm paying a monthly fee that provides up to 5 GB per month and I'm only using a fraction of that, I'm wasting money. Thus, I might as well find a way to max it out every month.

Yep, and this is in fact what I do with my home internet connection: non-critical downloads are kept aside until toward the end of my billing cycle, at which point I let them loose since I don't particularly care if I end up shaped for a few hours before the quota resets. But again, this is predictable behaviour which makes network capacity planning easy.

On the other hand, I have a 1 GB quota for my phone which I never get anywhere near (lucky to break 100 megs) and I've never tried to maximise my usage of that... but my phone isn't my primary internet access mechanism, so I guess the psychology is a bit different.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[Douglas Goodall]

I remember that. In 1972, ARPA net users were asked not to play chess on MIT-DMCG in the daytime. Those were the days of the 2400 baud leased lines. Things are obviously different now :-)

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[nazsco]

heh. here in the non-sprint USA, AT&T *FORCED* unlimited data when you got a smart phone.

that's not the joke yet, hang on...

so, after everyone bought unlimited data plan (with the most spoty coverage and dubious bandwidth) AT&T and others actually forced companies like google, apple, skype, etc, etc to forbid data heavy applications on the network.

everyone complied, and only allowed data heavy apps on wifi (skype, itunes >3mb, google hold back android sip client, and many other factual anecdotes)

now, that everyone is complaining and using rooted phones anyway, AT&T decided to fight back with data limits.

around july AT&T cancelled every new unlimited data plan offering (rembember, they were FORCING it, now it's IMPOSSIBLE). and around december everyone started announcing data heavy uses. skype now allows talk on 3g, google anounced sip client native (no more via a fake developer add on) etc etc

what's the joke you ask? US consumers are the joke.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[superdana]

imagine if you couldn't use your phone because the network was always full of other people's traffic?

I don't have to imagine that. It's a fact of daily life in San Francisco, and it's maddening.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[treeves]

I guess there's a reason why you chose that sig.
BTW, 50MB is some real low res video if you're talking about one hour, much less one day. And I'm sure there's no shortage of people at Verizon, Sprint et al. who want to pore over hours and hours of footage of our cell phones sitting in our pockets, on our desks, etc. to find something interesting.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[MareLooke]

Instead of a cap the majority of them now has a "fair use policy" (at least here in Belgium) which means they can advertise as "unlimited" transfer volume and just cut you off or throttle you down to dial up speeds whenever they rather arbitrarily decide your usage of bandwidth is no longer "fair".

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[jarlsberg71]

I would not be surprised if it had photos and GPS data embedded into a table and replicated to a DB somewhere.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[gbjbaanb]

you're confusing the cap you get with the total cap the network has. Those new limits were imposed roughly the same time the iPhone and other smart phones appeared, became very popular, and started sucking up bandwidth like a vacuum compared to old phones that could-but-you-never-really-did use the internet.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[weeb0]

Nice! Where I work, we are with Bell... For 20bucks per blackberry, we have a 4mb dataplan ... WOW! Very nice from Rogers. I am surprised!

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[karnal]

Those new limits showed up I'd say in the last 6 months; advertised heavily as saving the consumer money. Honestly though, I think that the caps probably make the companies more money in overage charges from those that aren't paying attention to what they're using.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[darthflo]

What I want is a committed rate and the option to pay in advance for a higher committed rate.

My cell's data plan includes 500 MB of data per month. That's not a lot, but it's enough for my push E-Mail, some browsing, Android Market downloads and whatnot. Each month spans a duration of some 2.5 Million seconds. If I had a commited rate, my data plan would be equivalent to (less than) 200 bps. A 2 MB Download would take three hours. Downloading Skype (at some 15 MB) would take approximately a day. And actually using Skype, I might transmit a second of audio every ten and receive another every other ten seconds.
I prefer to download Skype in a minute and tone back the data use for the rest of the day. Or use the bandwidth I won't be using while asleep for an hour-long call while I'm awake. Long story short, there's a reason server(-style) bandwidth is sold and metered in mbps and consumer bandwidth is sold in GB/month: completely different usage patterns.

Re:Data plan limits are a scam

[sjames]

Of course another solution is for them to actually provide a decent amount of bandwidth. Given that a voice call cannot really happen at less than 9600 bps even w/ compression and they can somehow not have their network destroyed by it, that would be a decent starting point (note that POTS voice is 64kbps). If their network can't handle better than a PATHETIC 200bps average they need to just admit they're not actually a telecommunications company.

After that, it's not uncommon on throttled connections to allow bursting.

I would find that to be preferable by far. I need to not run out before the end of the month and get charged "bend over" rates. With a committed rate, I can be sure that the most critical functions of email and light web browsing will always work without me being robbed at the end of the month.

I'll bet if they were forced to admit that the average speed was less than those old acoustic modems, they'd up the limit or cut the price.

What's so different?

[Jerry]

All of the Winddows OS's have been sending "demographic" data back to Redmond on a regular basis for years. This was throughly documented on the old F**KMicrosoft.com website.

Re:What's so different?

[KublaiKhan]

This also seems similar to a story that came out a while back regarding mystery data xfers on the iphone, though in that case, IIRC, the mystery xfers were not applied to the plan's data cap.

Re:What's so different?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

This also seems similar to a story that came out a while back regarding mystery data xfers on the iphone

The iPhone data logs were determined to be daily data usage logs sent to AT&T for billing and for the data stats they provide via text to the user.

Re:What's so different?

[whiteboy86]

ORLY??? Have you anything to backup that claim ? Or specify that "leak" website more ? If true, that could trigger a massive privacy related class action lawsuit against MS.

Re:What's so different?

[hcs_$reboot]

Did anything change since?
It looks like we, poor users, are helpless facing those hidden dirty tricks.

Re:What's so different?

[Jerry]

The site has been offline for two years, but the Internet Archive has most of it is HERE .

Read it and weep. Nothing will be done because most Windows users, like you, prefer to not believe that they are being spied on, or that former Microsoft employee James Plamondon trained "Technical Evangelists" who astroturf websites making fun of such claims.

You should read James Plamondon's mea culpa concerning his training of PAID "Technical Evangelists" to do the "Slog", the "Stuffed Panel", Astroturf congress and various websites with pro Microsoft and/or anti-Apple or Linux lies, etc...

Plamondon had to do a mea culpa because his activity was exposed in the Combs vs Microsoft lawsuit where the training documents he wrote were released to the public. As an example of how TE's work, read exerpts from Plamondon's training manual for the phrase "stacked panel", "The Slog", and other techniques here.

When Joe Barr wrote SLIME in 1994, he didn't know about the TE's Microsoft had unleashed on the world, but he described them to a tea:
http://slated.org/more_microsoft_dirty_tricks_history

Internet Achive has the "SLIME" article here.

A more complete, but not exhaustive list of dirty tricks by Microsoft are listed here:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

Re:What's so different?

[Shoten]

This isn't even remotely true. I've done a lot of work on data leakage (related to propietary information) in dozens of companies, all of which in the Fortune 100. Doing this kind of work from a network-centric perspective (as I did it) involves tracking the relationships between everything...every inbound and outbound packet is analyzed and cataloged. I never once saw demographic data going to Microsoft or anyone else, and certainly not with the consistency that would be present from it happening everywhere there were Windows OS variants. Does a cellular-only version do it? I don't know...but the above accusation refers to "All of the Winddows OS's", and that's extremely far from the truth.

Re:What's so different?

[shutdown -p now]

I've read the link you posted. It goes on about "hidden files" that collect "every place you ever surfed on the Internet and all your emails". At that point I already saw where it is coming, but sure enough... the guys have discovered the files which keep IE browsing history. You know, the kind of thing that any browser has had for 15 years now?

As for email, they have also discovered that Outlook uses a database for that, and - as is common with ISAM databases - deleted records are not physically erased right away, but are simply marked as deleted so that they can be re-used later (or you can "compact" the database to get rid of them).

And then, both facts get spun into some paranoia stories about Big Brother in Redmond watching you etc.

Even so, I did not find anything on the website that mentions that this data is uploaded anywhere. So could you perhaps be more specific? Or is the black chopper there already?

Re:What's so different?

[terjeber]

Goodness gracious! Insane paranoia has been posted online as truth forever. I didn't seriously think that people who posted on /. actually BELIEVED that the earth was flat, that we never landed on the moon and other insanities.

Re:What's so different?

[terjeber]

Yes, and we never landed on the moon, it was the Smurfs that brought down the Twin Towers using invisible exploding bubble gum and a holographic projection of planes. Also, the world is flat and everybody is out to get you.

Or, to put it differently, you need to see your doctor now, you should not have stopped taking your anti-paranoia medication.

Re:What's so different?

[cbiltcliffe]

This also seems similar to a story that came out a while back regarding mystery data xfers on the iphone

The iPhone data logs were determined to be daily data usage logs sent to AT&T for billing and for the data stats they provide via text to the user.

Wait....you mean tell me the phone has to tell the ISP how much data it's used so they know what to bill?!?

I don't know about you, but this seems ripe for abuse to me. If phones can be jailbroken, surely they could also be configured to tell the ISP that only 100KB of data has been used, regardless of the fact that the connection has been saturated the entire month....

Microsoft's feature; your bug

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Get the idea? Spyware. Built into the operating system. So you don't even have to install some dubious stuff to get spied on.

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[chemicaldave]

I believe some packet inspection is in order before we make claims like that.

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Some days I also wonder what Slashdot would be like without unsubstantiated claims.

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[thijsh]

That's why spyware would do exactly what is described here, use the 3G and not the Wifi... Because 3G traffic is much harder to capture and inspect...

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[Anonymous Coward]

2 or 3 posts / story max. Of course, this is an unsubstantiated claim. :D

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[chemicaldave]

That's why spyware would do exactly what is described here, use the 3G and not the Wifi... Because 3G traffic is much harder to capture and inspect...

Harder, but not impossible. All it takes is one hacker to investigate what's in the packets...

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[Andy Dodd]

Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to packet-inspect 3G data usage of a closed proprietary OS without provider cooperation...

Even if you had one of those AT&T femtocells, you likely would just see traffic between the femtocell and an AT&T server that handled femtocell traffic and then routed it to the real world.

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, wonder if the person is on a terrorist tracking list? Perhaps the data includes minute-by-minute GPS location information, calling information and heavily compressed voice logs. The telcos all have these backdoors into their systems for the government to spy on you.

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[icebike]

Ah, but the femtocell packet inspection is actually a brilliant concept.

The femtocell sits on your normal network, and putting it on a hub makes all of its traffic open to in-house packet inspection. Even if all you got was IP addresses that would be a start.

It may be encrypting traffic it places on the network, but it seems unlikely it would encrypt standard packet structures.

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Cellphone snooping now easier and cheaper than ever
Breaking GSM for $650
courtesy of El Reg:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/03/gsm_eavesdropping/

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[Anonymous Coward]

And that traffic goes over IPsec. Good luck reading that.

Re:Microsoft's feature; your bug

[cbiltcliffe]

It may be encrypting traffic it places on the network, but it seems unlikely it would encrypt standard packet structures.

If the data uses protocol encapsulation, then you're SOL trying to figure out even the final destination.

By that I mean, if the data is sent from your phone directly to an AT&T server, which then forwards it on to a third party, (maybe Microsoft, maybe not) based on either an agreement with the third party, or a final destination header that's in the encrypted payload of the data sent from the phone, then there's no easy way to figure out who the third party is.

Of course, this means that AT&T would have to be implicit in whatever plot this is, so you could always find an AT&T engineer and apply the rubber hose technique until they crack.....

Probably not.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had the Samsung Focus since mid-November. I use it heavily for email, browsing, and even the occasional Netflix stream of a TV show. I rarely enable WiFi. I just pulled up my usage on AT&T's website, and I'm averaging about 1GB/month.

Count me as a "No" datapoint in response to Paul Thurrott. Next question, please.

Re:Probably not.

[bkaul01]

Ditto, except for the WiFi bit ... I upgraded from an old WM6.5 phone and always left WiFi off there to preserve the battery. With the Focus, I tend to leave it on, so some of my usage has transferred over and I'm down around 500 MB/month rather than my previous 1-2 GB on average.

It should also be noted that AT&T's terminology on their data usage breakdown considers everything as "sent" regardless of the direction of data transfer, since the phone initiated the transaction (as opposed to an incoming text message or phone call). I suspect those 30-50 MB chunks of data "Sent" are most likely downloads, rather than uploads. I'm quite certain I haven't uploaded 458 MB so far in this billing cycle against zero downloads, even though all that usage shows as "Sent." They simply don't break it down into upload/download for you.

My guess would be that the user is probably using apps that pull more data than she realizes, and it's just normal usage.

Re:Probably not.

[MikeyC01]

My fiance' has a Focus too and AT&T's lowest data-tier plan (200 megs?). She mainly uses wi-fi and hasn't come close to the limit.

Re:Probably not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. My Windows Phone 7 is on T-Mobile and I see no data usage like that either.

Re:Probably not.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've bought Samsung Focus ten days ago for my wife and me (shared account) and we used the phones extensively on wifi and moderately on GSM - total 90MB, which doesn't seem to confirm "50MB per day through GSM even when connected to wifi" part of story.

Maybe the problem is phone related not Windows related?

Windows Update?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably downloading security fixes.

Re:Windows Update?

[fireylord]

Probably downloading security flaws.

FTFY

Microsoft has responded to this issue by...

[rshxd]

.. releasing a rubber casing to put around your phone due to the design flaw

Re:Microsoft has responded to this issue by...

[JoeCommodore]

.. releasing a rubber casing to put around your phone due to the design flaw

well... it worked for apple.

Re:Microsoft has responded to this issue by...

[noidentity]

Microsoft has responded to this issue by releasing a metal antenna casing to put around your phone due to the design flaw, preventing transmission of this data.

Fixed that for you.

#1 suspect: crash dumps

[jthill]

Debug code that didn't get turned off or something. 30-50MB bulk uploads in a kinda-regular pattern, and when she turns on airplane mode it seems to save them up.

#2 suspect: somebody found a hole, it's been botted right out of the gate.

Re:#1 suspect: crash dumps

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC Microsoft used to have deals with carriers that let Windows Mobile phones send crash/problem data to Microsoft over carrier network without the end user incurring any charges. May be Win Phone 7 does something similar but Microsoft forgot to extend the WinMo deal to 7?

Re:#1 suspect: crash dumps

[EvilIdler]

Crash logs is actually not a bad suggestion. Apple do it for iOS apps, but they are uploaded when synced with desktop iTunes. Developers can then inspect them in iTunes Connect.

spycam?

[swschrad]

scam in any event. MY data is supposed to be free. YOURS should pay me back.

Re:spycam?

[kj_kabaje]

mod this up. I think this is perhaps the most insightful comment yet in this thread. I pay for my data--not yours.

TCP routing issue probably

[Anonymous Coward]

this looks suspiciously like a routing issue.

The main complaint is data is going over provider wireless when WLAN is available.
If the first part of his forum he comments that it was a download from wap.cingular of 150MB which he feels should have gone through the WLAN.
He's right.. If this is the case they will have to break the network stack out into separate data providers with separate gateways and make sure every program has a priority list of which provider to use since likely there is data send and receive that HAS to go through the providers wireless.
I suspect if his download was from a network address outside cingular it would have used the WLAN.
   

No, they are the reality of physics

[SuperKendall]

Data limits are a scam. They are a tool for cell companies to suck as much money out of their customers as possible.

They are a reflection of the physical reality that you can only support so many people on a wireless network of any kind. You simply cannot (physically!) have everyone able to use the full bandwidth a phone is capable of, all the time.

You have a lot more of a point in relation to wired networks, but for wireless networks tiered pricing was inevitable once they started being used heavily. AT&T was the first to do so, because they have the cellular network that sees the highest data load.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Wireless bandwidth prices are just going to increase. They are like IPv4 - limited and almost completely used. Reallocating TV space and other frequencies to wireless just postpones the inevitable a few years....

Wired communication is like a router and switch - point to point communication. Wireless is like a massive hub... and universe will not allow you to make a wireless switch :) So I guess the original parent needs to complain to God about his limited wireless!

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[TheLink]

Wired communication is like a router and switch - point to point communication. Wireless is like a massive hub... and universe will not allow you to make a wireless switch :)

You can have point to point wireless communications (there are already such devices out there). The difficulty is in having communications beams that you can aim and focus while being able to go through obstacles without killing or damaging stuff ;).

It may be easier if the antennas are bigger, but a large antenna can't fit in a pocket sized device.

That said, it is not always necessary for the antennas to be large on both sides.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the antennas need to be smaller. Think of an antenna like a switch with a limited number of ports. Saturation of the wireless spectrum is only relevant for the range of the antenna. Shorter ranges mean more people get broadband, but it also means a lot of new low power antennas need to be erected and that wireless devices need to hop between towers more frequently while moving. Also, frequency overlap has to be avoided - you can't have neighboring towers using the same frequencies without interference. This goal cannot be reached without the aid of software and an accurate map of the terrain. Even then there would still be problems since higher power is required in hilly areas to avoid dead zones.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[dgatwood]

Wireless bandwidth prices are just going to increase. They are like IPv4 - limited and almost completely used. Reallocating TV space and other frequencies to wireless just postpones the inevitable a few years....

Quite the opposite, actually. I would expect them to decrease over time like everything else in technology. As economies of scale kick in, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to build a cellular site. Therefore, the "we don't have enough cell sites to handle the bandwidth" argument doesn't really fly. And ultimately, bandwidth is only constrained if you don't have enough towers. You could put picocells in every business in a downtown area, for example, and you would never have a bandwidth problem because instead of all those phones shouting, they would be whispering at minimum gain. In the same vein, cellular providers could provide more seamless handoff functionality between towers and Wi-Fi and it would have the same effect.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Jerry]

No, you are wrong. It is NOT a matter of Physics. It could be at some time in the future but right now it is a matter of greed.

The USA ranks 31st in the world in average Internet bandwidth. It's not a matter of population density. Do those other 31 countries know something about Physics that we do not? It's not unusual tor cable and telco drones to astroturf such sites claiming that US speeds are "fine". Obviously we have lost our "1st world" Internet status to countries whose standard of living is way below ours.

Compare your speed in the US with other locations in the US HERE .

The 1996 Communications Act gave cable and telcos $200B to finish the fiber optic installations started by many local governments frustrated by refusals of those cable and telcos to move from Copper to glass, because of Copper's physical limitations to carry high bandwidth traffic. That act also prohibited local governments from "competing" against the cable and telcos, but it did not contain performance penalty clauses (imagine that!) so the cable and telcos pocketed the money and promptly forgot about the fiber optic. Oh, that act RE-DEFINED the definition of "high" bandwidth down to 200,000 b/s, which is about the top end of V.92 speeds. Now, you have telcos using phrasex like "fasterize your internet speed with ***", as they sell actually low speed DSL Tier connections, VOIP and Dish TV for $89/m for "life". In France, for $30/m, you can get 40Mb/s with free nation wide phone and 200 TV channels. Of course, France must know some Physics that is unknown in the US.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Dog-Cow]

Someone needs to learn the difference between wired and wireless.

You are an idiot.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Jerry]

You obviously can't read with comprehension: "cable and telcos". For you translate that as "wired and wireless".

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're an idiot.

Trying to equate "cable and telcos" to "wired and wireless" is just dumb. It's like you are trying to claim that telcos are only using wireless networks. And that completely misses the point the GP was making.

The PHYSICS problems do exist when you look at the individual CELLs that make up a CELLULAR data network. That can be a significant problem when you have a heavy concentration of users in a given area.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[sjames]

It's not like it's one nationwide collision domain though! The limit is the size of the cell. Between the cells, you are switching.

Meanwhile, if they're so cramped for space, why are they so busy carpet bombing us with ads for "4G" 30Mbps connectivity so you can watch TV on your cellphone? Truth in advertising (if it was enforced) would demand commercials where the spokesperson crawls out from under a rock covered in slime and says we very nearly approach showing some promise of not sucking too badly! Please give us some money!

If they can't do any better than this, then as a member of the public, I want the analog TV bandwidth back. Surely it can be put to a better use.

It's funny how 31 other countries manage to do so much better in wireless bandwidth. Are they in a different universe? If so, how do I know about them?

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[icebike]

No, you are wrong. It is NOT a matter of Physics. I

I stopped reading right there.

Because it is most certainly a matter of Physics.

There is a maximum number of handsets a given tower can handle with its assigned spectrum. There is a maximum tower density before they interfere with each other. There is a maximum number of bits you can transfer over a given frequency in a given time frame.

And these maximums are routinely being hit today in many places. Just about any place with an event (ball game, emergency), near most high schools, and entire cities with restrictive NIMBY tower permitting.

You simply can not continuously add bandwidth demand to the last mile of a cellular network.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Teun]

When they halve the size of their cells they double the potential bandwidth, it's as easy as that.

The 'lack' of bandwidth is not a physical limit, it's an investment strategy.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Teun]

There's nothing wrong with making the cells smaller, heck, the moaners about radiation would love the lower power requirements of the small cells.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[blair1q]

10 years ago, DSL was 256 kbps, though my home line only tested at 32 kbps so I had to use alternatives (Metricom/Ricochet, SpeedChoice, satellite, cable, etc, tried them all, currently getting 30 mbps on the cable). Now the phone company says they can deliver 7 mbps over my phone line. But they haven't dug up so much as a meter of the streets or replaced so much as a mile of cable in my city in that time (the corporation commission can confirm that). What changed? Physics? Or their willingness to put a few $100 routers at the CO nearest me?

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[lymond01]

It's funny how 31 other countries manage to do so much better in wireless bandwidth. Are they in a different universe? If so, how do I know about them?

All those 31 countries can fit inside the U.S. probably. Much easier to create a robust, well-managed network in an office building than a city. And so it's easier for Japan (the size of California) than it is for the U.S. If all our cable and wireless providers only had to deal with the west coast, we'd probably see some nice changes.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[sjames]

With more area comes more customers and so more revenue.

The old saw about density just doesn't play. Low density areas are well served by a low density deployment of cells, high density areas with a high density deployment. What will really matter most of the time both for the quality of the service and the cost of provisioning is customers/cell. U.S. providers are simply charging more and spending less.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Douglas Goodall]

That would depend on whether the improvement was in the link between the local pop and the CO, or whether the last mile got better. Over time the speed that fiber transducers can handle increases, and there is a long way to go yet before we can say we have hit the speed limit on the fiber. Where I live, the copper is so bad the DSL cannot even run reliably at 3Mb downward, and I refuse to pay $39/mo for 1.5Mb DSL. My cable internet is generally running at 16+Mb/sec downward and 4Mb upward. I think what is going on is that they put better coax in between my home and the pop at the edge of my subdivision, and it is probably fiber from there onward. But my business internet service is running off the same cable as my neighbors residential service, and when they start running torrent 24x7, my service degrades terribly. Why? Because even though I have a "business internet service", there is no committed information rate for me, and while things are usually good, I cannot count on the service from day to day. What good are my fixed IP numbers, if I cannot rely on the service to perform on any day, or at any bitrate? I was having trouble with my throughput recently, and a tech came out and found my problem was that a Comcast worker had come out and placed a filter on my feed to prevent any possibility of me receiving unauthorized video. But they put the filter in backwards, and it mucked up my internet for weeks.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[jtownatpunk.net]

You sound like an apologist. Compare Verizon's marketing material to the product they actually provide and tell me with a straight face that what they're doing is right and ethical.

"Into movies? Stream your favorite director's cut without annoying buffering. Or better yet, download and view full-length HD quality movies. Is music your thing? Download a song in 4 seconds. Skype a lot? Experience videoconferencing without jitter or stutter. Is social networking your life? Upload a photo in just 6 seconds. Watch live TV in mobile high-def right on your laptop."

But if you go to their service plans, 10 gigs will cost you $80/month. And $10/gig after that. This is criminal! Joe Sixpack doesn't know what a gigabyte is or how many of them he's going to suck up watching Air Bud in 1080 on his laptop.

Re:No, they are the reality of physics

[Deliveranc3]

No it's not like technology. It is an oligopoly sold by the state. In most cases the state's goal is to maintain control, therefore they add increasing amounts of regulation. This keeps small players out. Meanwhile the big players justify their ridiculous prices by saying they need to pay some of it to the government. Each area seems fine on it's own but combined they produce reduced network performance.

Suck it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a similar story about the iPhone a while back. Turns out it was just the day's data usage being 'billed' each night. The 30mb of data that you used throughout the day gets deducted from your allowance during the night. No story here, you used the data. Suck it up and move on. Disclaimer: I am an iPhone user and would therefore not be disappointed if this was in fact a flaw in WP7. Unfortunately/fortunately (delete as appropriate), it's not.

Umm..

[Anonymous Coward]

I know absolutely nothing about the author, but this statements seems a little naive:

> Thurrott has written a book on Windows Phone 7 and is unlikely to be making such a claim unless it has some substance

Making such a claim without substance seems like SOP when writing a book - it gets you free advertising on places like Slashdot.

Re:Umm..

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the other shit he's written, there's a 100% change his claim is wrong.

Man...

[mattgoldey]

those 5 guys that bought a Windows phone are gonna be pissed.

Re:Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

Five? It was two guys just last week!

Re:Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems the uproar is mostly from reviewers with free phones. The 5 people who actually bought one aren't internet users.

Re:Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually they sold a million Windows 7 phones with the Samsung Focus alone in week one so that's hardly anything to laugh at

Re:Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

those 5 guys that bought a Windows phone are gonna be pissed.

I realize this sort of childish comment is popular on Slashdot, but their sales are probably closer to a couple million (they announced 1.5M before Christmas. That number was probably phones shipped to carriers as opposed to customers, but again, it was before Christmas).

All you do is undermine your position with these tired, poor jokes.

Re:Man...

[kellyb9]

As I'm reading this, you have four anonymous coward comments... I guess the 5th guy hit his 2GB limit.

Re:Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sales are up by 250% in the week ending December 31st!

Re:Man...

[UnknowingFool]

Um, no. Analysts have estimated that MS has shipped a million phones. MS hasn't really released any sales numbers so it's hard to gauge about the success quite yet.

Re:Man...

[Jerry]

So they claim.

During the 4th quarter Apple sold 14 million iPhones, and over 73 million to date.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_simple.svg

Re:Man...

[rapturizer]

5? Isn't that a bit generous?

Re:Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

s/sold/channel stuffed/

Re:Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, yes.

XML here and there......

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not surprised. After all, WP7 is Silverlight based, an XML heavy framework. And also MSFT tendencies to overuse SOAP Web Services in everything, also another XML heavy protocol. Much of data transferred is probably just handshaking information.

All your bandwidth are belong to us!

[Just Brew It!]

50 MB is an awful lot. I can't imagine a legitimate reason to be sending that much data anywhere without the user's knowledge.

Re:All your bandwidth are belong to us!

[Douglas Goodall]

When the Darwin awards happen, internet usage and mail usage spike, big time.

Of course not!

[santax]

But we do have a feature that does the same.

iPhone DejaVu

[jtara]

This would be a case of dejavu for iPhone owners - if there were any that had switched to Windows 7...

This issue came up a while back with the iPhone. Users world-wide on different carriers reported a similar issue. I don't think it was ever fully resolved, but the consensus seemed to be "aggregate billing". That is, the billing system might be aggregating many small sessions during the day and reporting them at the time of "collection" rather than the actual time of use. That is, people were seeing data being billed during times of day when they KNEW they were at home or the office on WiFi, but perhaps it was just when they were out of the house and reported later.

Alternately there was a theory about "statistics" (what kind?) being sent that are always sent over the carrier network.

Like I said, never fully resolved. I set up my smart switch so that I could monitor outbound traffic, and never caught anything definitive. Dunno if anybody else ever figured out what the traffic was.

Re:iPhone DejaVu

[MBCook]

That was exactly what I thought of when I first read this too. Read the lady's letter. Facebook automatically downloads pictures and updates and she plays a lot of Bejeweled. If FB is caching pictures for her and she has a lot of friends, I could see hitting 30-50MB in a day.

I think you're right that this is a billing system issue. It shows no data use while you were using your phone, and it shows a ton when you're not. It's just coalescing things so you don't have 1200 data charges per day of 2-10kb each.

Re:iPhone DejaVu

[jtara]

To clarify the iPhone situation: the initial reports (on MacRumors) were from people inspecting their billing reports and apparently seeing nightly uploads at 2AM. This varied - mine were around midnight, and perhaps had to do with timezone. Most reports were 2AM, though.

So, I set-up to try to catch the packets. There was not yet any indication that the traffic was going over the cellular network exclusively - just that "something" was being sent nightly at 2AM and people were suspicious - while they slept, their phones were uploading SOMETHING.

I set out to capture it, assuming that while the phone was on my wiFi network, it would route the traffic over the WiFi. But I never say any traffic, other than when I was actually using the iPhone for data.

Based on that, we concluded that some traffic must be being sent exclusively over the cellular network. Unfortunately, snooping on that takes more sophisticated equipment than a smart switch on your LAN, and I don't think the traffic was ever identified.

Data being sent:

[Anonymous Coward]

left,left,left,up,up,up,down,down,right,up,

right, up, up, up, up, left, down

left,left,left,up,up,up,down,down,right,up,

repeat for 4 hours

Tetris: would you like to start a new game?

click,move to xy, release

click,move to xy, release

click,move to xy, release

repeat for 4 hours

Solitare: would you like to start a new game?

But what settings are being used?

[wilgibson]

Seriously, I hear a lot about web use and Facebook but what about other things. Do those with high usage use the auto-upload for Skydrive? Is "find my phone" turned on, and if so is it set to periodic or all the time? What about "feedback," is it on or off, and is it set to be allowed to use your cellular data plan? These are all options on the phone, and they are options that could quickly rack up usage if forgotten about. My WP7 phone has quickly become my camera of choice for point and click exactly because it auto-uploads to Skydrive. I was not amazed at all when I had used 1 gigabyte of data with my new WP7 phone the first month I had it.

Re:But what settings are being used?

[wilgibson]

Also might want to note that it auto-downloads updates all at one time for any applications installed on the phone.

"your phone is sending 50Mb..."

[msauve]

Microsoft (in its best Groucho Marx voice): Have you ever seen any pictures of yourself in the nude?
User (sounding like Margaret Dumont): Why, good gracious, no!
Microsoft: Well then, would you like to buy some?

Re:"your phone is sending 50Mb..."

[Jeffrey_Walsh VA]

...and 98% of the comments here are about wireless data plans? Microsoft's PR machine is proving highly effective. The data isn't sent via wifi where we might monitor what is being sent more easily. Suggesting this is a bug is letting MS off easy.

My Alarm didn't go off

[Anonymous Coward]

What did I miss? LMAO

Re:4 points to make.

[scrib]

Or they might mod you down because your post is complete devoid of useful or interesting content...

I would, however, give you a +1 Ironic Sig.

Not a problem on my Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a Samsung Focus a few weeks after they came out, and am running just over 250MB/month. Two email addresses, and a moderate amount of web surfing and Marketplace use. I'm inclined to think there's a problem with his setup.

thank god

[jcombel]

paul thurott is a microsoft fan, and windows junkie. he writes a lot about microsoft products, and usually positively, given his preference. he also makes money writing and blogging about MS products..

that results in conspiracy theorists in slashdot comments to claim he is a paid employee of microsoft every time his name is mentioned and as such dismiss him

which is pretty unfortunate, as he and his material tend to be useful for those of us that are forced to/choose to use microsoft products

now we have a slashdot front page article of a pretty big criticism from thurott. something to link to in future articles!

Re:thank god

[jcombel]

aw god now i'm a thurott paid employee~~~~

Not Just Windows Phone 7

[unimacs]

A number of iPhone users have a had a similar problem including my wife though the transmissions are not daily. There are long threads on the topic in the Apple discussion forums. The transmissions are made at night while she's not using the phone. Even the phone is asleep, otherwise it would use our home wifi rather than the 3g connection. Crash dumps are one suspect. I've walked through the steps to turn off reporting that data to Apple but the transmissions continue. Usually about one or two a week. Enough to push her over the limit for her data plan. If it is diagnostic information, the usage should be charged to Apple and not the phone users.

Re:Not Just Windows Phone 7

[gmfeier]

I have had an iPhone 3G for almost 2 years. I mainly use wifi so I have the minimum data plan. I just checked my AT&T account usage for the past 5 months and I'm seeing an average of 16.5 MB. That does not seem to leave a lot of room for any extra transmissions.

Re:Not Just Windows Phone 7

[unimacs]

It doesn't happen to everyone. I have an iphone as well and don't see these large transmissions. In fact I used to have my wife's phone but I got a new one and gave her mine. Never had a problem like she's experiencing. She rarely does anything over 3G aside from reading email and some occasional web browsing. If you look at her usage there will be 3K here, 5K there, and then between 11:00 pm and 2:00 am on random days you'll see 72 MB, 30 MB, 50 MB.

re: MetroPCS, etc.

[King_TJ]

I agree with you, except I'm pretty doubtful that MetroPCS *really* allows you to use unlimited amounts of data each month for the flat rate. If you read all the fine print, I'm willing to bet it's just like my Cricket Wireless account -- where "unlimited data" actually means a monthly limit of 2GB per month, that if exceeded, means you get throttled back to very SLOW transfer rates for all your remaining usage until that month is over. You don't get charged any overages though, which is the main thing I'm worried about. But in reality, they do meter your usage and limit you when you exceed a threshold.

Re:4 points to make.

[Lashat]

"Well touche."
or
"Since when has that been a requirement for posting to /.?"

can't reproduce

[Anonymous Coward]

Just checked my data usage on my Samsung Focus and it is only 109MB and I am 26/31 days into the billing cycle. While I am almost always in a wifi area, this seems more like my actual usage on the 3G network. There is no '50MB of data' per day usage on my Windows Phone 7.

Just run a packet inspector

[RHochstenbach]

Just take out the SIM card and set up WiFi. Then have a packet inspector running on the network for as long as possible. You'll quickly notice what kind of data the phone is sending/receiving.

Re: MetroPCS, etc.

[rrossman2]

Immix lists unlimited, and it is unlimited. I used over 5gb of data during my laster semester doing remote desktop and a few other things to get my school work done, and it was never throttled nor mentioned to me in any fashion. Typically I'm around the 2gb +/- a few hundred megs

No 50 MB data transfers here

[Anonymous Coward]

My roommate and I checked our T-Mobile records. Nothing at all approaching 50 MB in a day over the last two months. There was one day showing about 25 MB, but that was me downloading a few apps over the cell network instead of Wi-Fi.

Nothing like that here

[jeffgeno]

I've had my Focus from day one and never had anything like that. I think the people having the problems got review units without final firmware. They're sending debug data back to Microsoft every night.

But has he followed up on the suggested fixes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the mailbag post (TFA) is dated yesterday but the author links to his windows phone secrets blog - one dated December 6th. Since he's known about it for almost a month now, I wonder if anyone has tried suggested possible fixes given in the comments of the secrets blog.

1. In Settings->Feedback there is an option to “Use my cellular data connection to send feedback” I turned this off! But still have send feedback enabled.

Another issue, also linked to earlier in the comments, says:

WiFi is turned off when the phone sleeps. This is by design, in order to preserve battery life.

The exception is when the phone is plugged in to a power source. In this case, WiFi will remain ON (if it was on when the phone goes into standby).

Given the large burst of data mentioned in TFA:

On December 23rd I turned on airplane mode so my phone could no longer send data. I turned airplane mode off briefly on December 23rd and the phone sent 400 MB of data.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is "feedback" data being built up and sent "home" - however it's a bit confusing that turning airplane mode on/off on the same day, if not a typo, would increase the amount of data by 10x.

Microsoft has a new phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriusly? When did that happen?

I know what's in that data!

[solune]

This phone was *obviously* developed with the Lower Merion School District in mind!

Re:help help I'm being oppressed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, they are not. I hate data limits, but people can be assholes. People will have bittorrent going 24/7 downloading seasons of shows they will probably never watch anyway. Seriously. people just hoard terabytes of shit. And these hoarders just transfer gigabytes back and forth to each other constantly. It's like they're just trying to get a complete set of everything on TV for a given year. Ooh, a new year has just begun!

They already do this on landline internet. Can you imagine these fuckers saturating the mobile spectrum as well? Because they will. They don't understand limits. You're inhibiting their freedoms n' shit. They don't understand that what they're doing is being a server without paying what people usually do for hosting. except these servers don't have peak times. They're constantly sharing data. I saw some guy on reddit this week bitching about them imposing a 300 GB limit because his monthly usage was 800 GB. People like that are the reason you can't have unlimited internet. Because they abuse the shit out of it.

Imagine a hundred million people leaving their tubs and faucets flowing 24/7. For no fucking purpose. It's just all overflowing into their backyard. They'll never swim in it or anything, they just like that it's there. All the people with shitty water pressure or imposed water limits? Who cares! I'm happy.

tl:dr = who let all the sociopath hoarder types on the internet?

Wireless networks are artificially limited

[Skapare]

They could have wireless networks that are 10, or even 100, times greater capacity than they have now. But they don't only because of a "collective" decision to do so. And the phone companies like it that way. An artificial shortage of supply, while generating and driving a higher demand, means they can raise prices and profit.

My money's on...

[Mia'cova]

all the marketplace crash logs :)

This appears to be bogus.

[Johnny Bailey]

Based on TMobile's report of my data usage this month, I'd say this is bogus. Since the WiFi shuts down to conserve battery when the screen shuts off, an application left in the foreground might run this up though. A push service pushing lots of data might also have this effect, but it clearly isn't in the default configuration.

2GB per month ..... 50MB per day ......

[Debro]

Telstra (Australia) is handing out data plans with their smart phone which are limited to 150MB per month (inclusive of uploads & downloads), and then the pain begins.