iPhone User Blames “WiFi Assist” For $2,000 Phone Bill

techrat said:
Extremely similar to my usage except all my texts end up as data because I use Google Voice. I find it incomprehensibly difficult to understand how someone can break 2GB a month in data unless they're doing torrents on their cell plan.

ONLY time I ever exceeded 2GB in a month was when I had to tether my phone due to an internet outage at home. So I pretty much assume that's the case when someone complains about being throttled.
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i find it interesting that you find using more than 2GB is that hard, if you dont watch video at all then you're the avg Joe user who uses a smartphone for email and the odd facebook,, this is how mobile operators want you to use your phone as if a a lot of people in your area (over 250-1000 depending if its 3G or 4G(real 4G not fake) start using data in a more constant manner mobile data just grinds to a halt even voice and text start to fail

youtube is the main one in 720/1080p it can use 1GB an hour or 2 (if HD streaming is enabled in the app i believe its off by default, its capped at 480p which will still use over 200-500mb an hour)

the Wifi assist should never been enabled by default unless you understand the repercussions of enabling it, as Apple stupidly still lacks a Basic monthly data monitor (unless you Pay for a data monitor app as i only found DataMan Pro/Next to be reliable but its like £4 for it) the phone should have a Monthly data monitor like android has for very long time (at least its the customers fault for not turning the data monitor on there phone then)

HTC and samsung your phone gets a Page full of warning when you turn it on Smart Wifi (as smart wifi can be worse than having roaming switched on as people are finding out)

apple do lack a number of fail to display persistent warnings, turning on Data Roaming is only displayed once when you enable it, but EU data roaming is displayed every single time you enable it, Wifi assist is enabled by default and does not warn you when you re enable it that you Will incur data Usage or charges by using this feature (same for MMS and texting short code numbers that might be premium rate services)

Wifi assist only benefits the mobile operator (until the user is aware of it then its the users fault for not turning Wifi Assist off or using a data monitor or both)

i have a True unlimited data plan with 3UK so it would not affect me personally as it would work As intended as i have a plan that has no charges as i cant go over my data allowance as i don't have one,, well i do but its 1000GB and i find it hard pressed to get it past 20GB when i am trying passively (passively as in not turning Wifi on at home and friends), sure if i really tryed i can use past 100GB

but Apple should Not be assuming that everyone has Unlimited data and enabling a feature that can silently switch to 3G or 4G,, as it can do this when your say watching a video, i had some people with 1-2GB data plans and only using less than 500MB a month and only watch videos when at home and wiping their data allowance out in a week after updating to IOS 9 as they was using it at the low signal range of there wireless network as shown on the video on that website i assume this news linked to
 
Bowman15 said:
Use your mobile phone as a cable TV device and you deserve what you get. No sympathy here.
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i agree, still mobile operators should only traffic shape people on highly loaded masts
it should be based on top 5% high data users for moderate traffic shaping, top 1% high data users should be capped even harder to 128kbs to stop them from streaming video/torrenting on a highly congested masts, if they move off that mast onto an uncongested mast then full speed should be restored (its how 3 do it in the UK)

unlimited data only has to be data not the speed it comes at
 
im a heavy phone user, constantly on facebook/instagram/soundcloud etc im constantly texting sending pictures and videos and i hit close to 5gb a month. i couldnt imagine doing 100gb+ a month, you would pretty much never be on wifi to use that kind of data. i find it surprising nowadays that people don't utilize wifi especially when its around then atleast 30% of the day
 
akaliel said:
I'm at work for almost all of my usage. My company has locked down their internet pretty tight, most sites are blocked outright and for the ones that aren't WebSense makes you click a "Your boss is watching you. Are you sure you want to go to this site?" button. Even if the site is just google news. So everyone around here uses their phones to waste time when we're not busy.
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I don't have that problem since I'm the one who controls the office network/firewall/internet :)
Company policy is to keep it open, since we do a lot of remote customer support, demo, etc.

Only time I bother to check activity is if I see heavy traffic for an extended time, or a manager asks me to see what a certain person has been doing the last couple days since they haven't been doing much work :)
 
Makaveli@BETA said:
Agreed but in this day and age no one thinks they have to learn anything about the products they buy. They just want to be spoon fed for everything or to just pickup a phone and call someone until they get a $5,000 bill then now its a priority.

And apple users are the worse for this.
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I agree people have to be accountable but I do think there are some reasonable expectations.

Your bill doubles due to not knowing the tech or repercussions of use, OK I can buy that. But 10x or 100x your expected monthly bill is imo beyond reasonable.

I don't care what kind of service or product we are talking about. If you can be on the hook for 10x+ your expected cost without some sort of reasonable warning or opt-in its imo the vendors responsibility. I would even say it probably is purposefully done by the vendor. This sort of crap happens all the time just to get suckers. Let the non complainers pay and quickly correct at first mention for those that do. This imo is just low, and proves the vendor doesn't believe in their services value.

Some states have "quote"/contract laws where if the cost goes over X% of a quote of service, various additional methods of communication and agreements have to be made. I don't see why these cannot apply in some fashion.
 
Just ran into this junk with my wife's phone yesterday. Thankfully we caught it before we went over, but her phone used up 75% of our data in about a week because of this. It's annoying that it's turned on by default, and there's no noticeable signs that WiFi assist is working in the background, the icon makes it look like you're just using WiFi.
 
kirbyrj said:
That's not true.
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Not really the same thing, the person you quoted and actually misleadingly quoted I will add... explained the context of throttling due to network performance and availability or actually limitation. He actually implied it should ONLY occur in that situation.

Your link is about ATT universally throttling unlimited users if they use too many GBs, NOT due to performance or health of the network at the time of data use.

This is VERY common and imo perfectly acceptable... the reason why we see advertising commonly state "upto". Now I would say companies that are fully aware of overloading are bastards but one cannot reasonably expect a company to always support 100% speeds during peak times... well not for reasonable or cheap(er) pricing.
 
It is the same thing. If it weren't for network limitations, there wouldn't be throttling. Hence, the throttling and the lawsuit.

I think that in the case of a highly congested mast, AT&T, et. al. should be installing additional infrastructure. That is what is perfectly acceptable rather than hardcapping people at 128kbps as likeman suggests for the top 1%.
 
kirbyrj said:
It is the same thing. If it weren't for network limitations, there wouldn't be throttling. Hence, the throttling and the lawsuit.

I think that in the case of a highly congested mast, AT&T, et. al. should be installing additional infrastructure. That is what is perfectly acceptable rather than hardcapping people at 128kbps as likeman suggests for the top 1%.
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Disagree completely. The FCC fined ATT for throttling the speed of "unlimited" plans for using too much data content, NOT for using too much speed or being on a congested network. It is expressly implied that "Unlimited" refers to the amount of data used not the speed, as likemen suggested and you flat out said he was wrong.

likeman suggested that obsessively high "unlimited" data users be the ones throttled first/more during congestion. While you can debate the subtitles of what is too much and even if it applies to "unlimited" in this case I don't think its wrong to have the discussion.. it is reasonable imo when trying to manage a shared resource.

I agree providers should be managing their infrastructure but we seem to have different ideas what is reasonable.

Should ATT add infrastructure because on one day for one minute their network got congested? 5 days for one hour? Its easy when congestion is occurring all the time but where is the line? Most providers have peaks and they all have to balance cost and availability against those peaks.

This is why "upto" is used and makes sense, its a grey area and the quality of service provider reflects the reality of this. As I said someone who over-congests and never upgrades are douches but if your speed is 80% during a couple of peak hours... is accectable if all other things being equal (aka you are not paying for peak or min speed).
 
dandirk said:
Disagree completely. The FCC fined ATT for throttling the speed of "unlimited" plans for using too much data content, NOT for using too much speed or being on a congested network. It is expressly implied that "Unlimited" refers to the amount of data used not the speed, as likemen suggested and you flat out said he was wrong.

likeman suggested that obsessively high "unlimited" data users be the ones throttled first/more during congestion. While you can debate the subtitles of what is too much and even if it applies to "unlimited" in this case I don't think its wrong to have the discussion.. it is reasonable imo when trying to manage a shared resource.

I agree providers should be managing their infrastructure but we seem to have different ideas what is reasonable.

Should ATT add infrastructure because on one day for one minute their network got congested? 5 days for one hour? Its easy when congestion is occurring all the time but where is the line? Most providers have peaks and they all have to balance cost and availability against those peaks.

This is why "upto" is used and makes sense, its a grey area and the quality of service provider reflects the reality of this. As I said someone who over-congests and never upgrades are douches but if your speed is 80% during a couple of peak hours... is accectable if all other things being equal (aka you are not paying for peak or min speed).
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I mostly agree with this.

The truth is that while throttling and data caps on wireless networks are not DIRECTLY linked to congestion, they are an INDIRECT predictor of congestion.

If you can only use 2 gigs a month, you are less likely to congest a network than if you use 200Gigs.

What AT&T did was to just arbitrarily throttle unlimited users with excessive totals to try to address congestion, but this had the effect of also limiting unlimited users whenthere was no congestion. What they should have done, was implemented some sort of throttling of unlimited users with excessive usage only during actual times of congestion on their local node. My guess is they didn't have the ability to fine tune it this way, and instead applied a sledgehammer to the problem.

The truth is that unlike wired networks where you can just add another fiber, or bump up to a higher bandwidth fiber, in wireless there is only a limited amount of spectrum. As technology improves you can make better use of that limited spectrum, but in any given generation (3g, 4g, 5g..) there is only so much bandwidth you can transfer in the spectrum that is available.

This is why wireless data shouldn't be used for primary internet access. It should be an "on the go" thing, only used when out of range of your home line, or to back it up when it isn't working.

All the young hipsters who are cord cutting and replacing home internet will cell service (either tethering, or just using the phone/tablet directly) are the problem.

Heck, personally I don't even use WiFi for stationary systems, let alone mobile data.

The selection criteria should be something like this:

Wired Ethernet -> WiFi -> Mobile Data

You only move to the right, if the first option isn't reasonably available. (And no, being too lazy to run a wire in your home, does not qualify as not reasonably being available)
 
dandirk said:
Disagree completely. The FCC fined ATT for throttling the speed of "unlimited" plans for using too much data content, NOT for using too much speed or being on a congested network. It is expressly implied that "Unlimited" refers to the amount of data used not the speed, as likemen suggested and you flat out said he was wrong.

likeman suggested that obsessively high "unlimited" data users be the ones throttled first/more during congestion. While you can debate the subtitles of what is too much and even if it applies to "unlimited" in this case I don't think its wrong to have the discussion.. it is reasonable imo when trying to manage a shared resource.

I agree providers should be managing their infrastructure but we seem to have different ideas what is reasonable.

Should ATT add infrastructure because on one day for one minute their network got congested? 5 days for one hour? Its easy when congestion is occurring all the time but where is the line? Most providers have peaks and they all have to balance cost and availability against those peaks.

This is why "upto" is used and makes sense, its a grey area and the quality of service provider reflects the reality of this. As I said someone who over-congests and never upgrades are douches but if your speed is 80% during a couple of peak hours... is accectable if all other things being equal (aka you are not paying for peak or min speed).
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The whole issue of throttling "unlimited data" is that you don't actually have unlimited data if you can only use it at speed reduced to the point of being useless. The point was that it wasn't 80% of normal speed, it was more like 5% or less of normal speed. At the end of the day, cell phone service is a utility. If you got 5% of your normal electricity for 100% of your normal monthly cost would you be upset?

Disclaimer: I'm one of your so-called "douches" who still has a grandfathered unlimited data plan and doesn't upgrade to keep it :rolleyes:.
 
kirbyrj said:
It is the same thing. If it weren't for network limitations, there wouldn't be throttling. Hence, the throttling and the lawsuit.

I think that in the case of a highly congested mast, AT&T, et. al. should be installing additional infrastructure. That is what is perfectly acceptable rather than hardcapping people at 128kbps as likeman suggests for the top 1%.
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Well, in some remote areas, maybe it's just a matter of adding a mast, but in many cases it's really a limitation of spectrum.

With copper / fiber it is fairly straight forward to add another line, or bump the current one up if needed. When you have a spectrum limitation, all you can go is wait for the next gen wireless (4g -> 5g) in this case
 
kirbyrj said:
Disclaimer: I'm one of your so-called "douches" who still has a grandfathered unlimited data plan and doesn't upgrade to keep it :rolleyes:.
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IMHO, just having it unlimited doesn't make one a douche.

It is having an unlimited plan, and abusing it by not having home internet, tethering it and using it for things like torrents that makes one a douche and is why we can't have nice things :p

Mobile data is for when you are on the go. When you are at home or at work you should be using ground based services.

Mobile data is not intended to be a primary mode of internet delivery. It is a backup for when your primary is down, or when you are on the move.

I'd be happy if all carriers just said enough is enough, as of date X, all grandfathered unlimited plans will be converted into regular plans.

Actually, I'd even go further. Get rid of all plans even chunks of data, and make all data metered.

Something like this:
- Line access fee $20 per month, includes unlimited domestic voice/text
- $10 per GB of data, no matter how much you use.

That ought to kill off the data hogs, and make the services more responsive for people who use them for what they are intended. Temporary access when on the go.
 
i don't fully agree on forcing people to be moved off unlimited data plans it should just be Traffic Managed correctly (an 21-23GB number then your slowed down on any mast is just cheap way to handle it, and will do nothing if your on a mast that is congested and the top 5% are not been slowed down so the other 90-95% have a good experience still)

i did try to carefully word it (and unlike a hardline connection you cant just add more bandwidth as your limited by the Radio bandwidth not the backhaul links to the mast)

Traffic Management on highly loaded masts only should affect capped and unlimited data plans (it should not matter what plan your on) the top 5% high data users get reduced speeds and top 1% have 128kbs until they move onto another mast or back down (which would happen as 128kbs is only good enough for basic browsing with Opera with turbo enabled and messaging email)

but overall unlimited users are likely to get hit first due to higher data use in some cases (people using it like a hardline broadband connection which mobile networks are not intended to be used for as there is limited bandwith)

i am on 3 in the UK and the above policy seems to work perfectly fine (once your in top 5% you get Lowest QOS Priority for data i think there is only 2 locations where it affects me, VoLTE still gets highest priority in any case so LTE calls work fine)
 
shatterstar said:
Oh what does it matter anyway, your an Iphone user. Your used to overpaying anyway.

:)
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I really didn't overpay. I had two choices as an upgrade from my ancient dumbphone. It was either a brand new 5S or a Droid Mini. I preferred iOS after having used it for a few years on my iPod, so that was my choice. Both options were the same price.
 
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