My wife (and for the next week, myself) is/are in Alaska preparing her brother to join us in Mexico in retirement. He has no internet connectivity of any kind.

To solve this, my wife bought an ATT device called Velocity which provides local Wi-Fi connectivity by tying into the cellular network. ATT assured her that the 2GB per month plan would be plenty for email and Facebook.

It wasn't even close.

Is it even remotely possible that she could have used 1,785,699 kilobytes, not bytes, over a cellular connection by being on Facebook for less than half an hour? No videos watched, no files downloaded, just reading and answering Facebook posts.

ATT says, "Here are the dates and times and amounts of data you used, nothing we can do about it." At $25 for 2GB, plus the $150 for the device, I feel like she has been ripped off.

Is there something I don't understand here?

tanstaafl.

Unless you tell FB not to, it downloads all the vids on your newsfeed so it can play them when you scroll by them. It's irritating, made more so because every month or so it resets the setting not to do this.

Oh, and it's AT&T, of course she's been ripped off...

Though it may be true that videos which show up on the Facebook main feed are pre-downloaded, I am skeptical that a half hour of browsing facebook could be responsible for breaking a standard monthly data plan. Maybe. But there may be other factors you could look at.

According to AT&T's data calculator:
http://www.att.com/att/datacalculator/
You should not burn through that much data in half an hour. If my math is correct, your data usage equals about 992 kilobytes per second over that half hour period. That seems a bit much unless you were watching Netflix or something.


So questions to ask:
- Are there other programs running in the background which are downloading data?
- Is there a file sharing program of some kind running, such as BitTorrent?
- Are there other browser tabs open in the background which are downloading data?
- Are operating system updates downloading in the background?
- Are you sure that someone else isn't using the wifi connection?
- Are you sure that the device you got isn't a used device which already had some data usage on it (are the timestamps of the data usage they gave you accurate, or do some fall outside your usage range)?
- Are you absolutely positively sure that your number of 1,785,699 kilobytes is actually in kilobytes? Or is it in some other measurement amount other than kilobytes?

I'm going to say it's nearly impossible. I had a similar connection when I lived in Belize and it's pretty hard to hit 2gb with just email and facebook for 30 min/day.

I'm going with Tony's suggestion that there is something in the background running that is eating up her data allowance.

EDIT: Check for malware in addition to Tony's suggestions.

What computer and OS version is she using?

If she used the hotspot to connect the brothers computer to the internet for the first time in a while, I am betting it was OS background updates. 2GB of updates isn't uncommon for OS X or Windows over the period of a few months to a year.

And Doug, price wise, unfortunately that seems about right for the device and 2G of data with someone like AT&T. In the future she may want to investigate using such "personal hotspot" options on her phone if she has one capable of offering the feature. Would save on the cost of a physical device at least. Be warned though using these options on a phone tend to drain them quickly compared to the dedicated devices.

Ah, yes...Tom is right, you should be able to disable automatic updates with both the OS and antivirus. That very well may be the cause of your problem.

Does Facebook do any of that automatic photo uploading stuff?

Does iOS break out data usage by app?

Nope. She was using her old Samsung netbook running Windows XP. No updates there.

The Velocity thing is turned off (powered down) when not actively on-line.

What I question is whether it might even be possible to use 1.76 GB of data on a through a cheap little box on a cellular network in half an hour. By my numbers (which don't match Tony's):

1,785,699 Kilobytes in 30 minutes =
14,285,592 Kilobits in 30 minutes =
13,951 Megabits in 30 minutes =
465 Megabits in one minute =
7.75 Megabits per second transfer speed.

That would be respectable speed for a cable modem where I come from, and from the "feel" of it when I used it I would guess the actual data transfer rate of the Velocity was perhaps a quarter or less of what I get in Mexico at 15mbps on my cable modem.

We arenot going to plug another $25 into that Velocity. $50 an hour is too much to spend looking at Facebook. So my only internet access now is to take my $250 laptop to the local Sears mall where they have free WiFi. Slow WiFi: 1.26mbps download, about half that on upload. I don't know that the Velocity was a lot faster. I'm typing this right outside the door to the ATT store, I think I'll go ask them what they think their download speed is over their cellular network. Too bad I never thought to run the SpeedTest site when we had the Velocity running.

Tanstaafl.

1. No. This is a very basic Netbook running XP, no frills or options.
2. No. Email and Facebook, maybe an occasional airline reservation or Amazon shop is all.
3. No. She tends to do one thing at a time.
4. Not a chance with Windows XP.
5. Yes. ATT provided the times and data amounts of each use, and they are ours only.
6. Yes. See #5 above. Also, just-in-case, they swapped out the SIM, new password, same results.
7. Yes. Positive. Add them up and you get two gigabytes:

1,332 (Test at the ATT store to be sure the new $$ were installed)
138,944 (Doug's email and empeg bbs)
1,785,699 (Facebook as if you could't guess)
171,177 (Doug email, empeg bbs, and attempt to check something on Amazon.com when it quit)
----------
2,097,152 Kilobytes =
2,048 Megabytes =
2.000 Gigabytes.

Those four sessions were all we got for our $25, over a total time period of 22 hours.

tanstaafl.

Definitely possible with LTE (4G), and very possible with later 3G standards. My now two year old LTE capable phone frequently sees 70Mbit service in downtown Seattle (Fastest test has been 92.88Mbit). The new upgrade I'll pick up later this year will push that higher.

Cellular networks have advanced a lot with the rise of the smartphone. All those "cheap little boxes" are just slimmed down smartphones basically.

Being that the laptop is on XP, I'd fear it's infected with malware that was causing high amounts of traffic. I'd personally never use an XP or older OS connected to the internet at this point.

Maybe you could leverage some kind of a tool which inspects the traffic and catalogs the bandwidth usage. There are a lot of them out there, though, and choosing the right one might be tricky.

Ideally you'd want one which just totaled up all the data flowing to given addresses, and give you a usage report showing which network addresses were responsible for the bandwidth usage, correlated perhaps to which apps/processes on the PC were doing the using. Maybe along with some DNS or Whois lookups to tell you in plain english which sites these processes are connecting to. Most network monitoring tools (like this one I think can do this as a subset of their full suite, but the overall product is designed to do so much more than that, that it'd probably make it not very easy to use for that one simple task.

Anyone recommend of a small, simple utility to do that job?

*shudder*

OK, I missed the part about XP. Please stop using that. In a world where you can get an HP Stream for $210, there's no sane reason to keep using a Windows XP computer.

The world has changed. No longer is an older but 'stable' operating system 'safe' or trustworthy.

For Windows, and even Mac, for most users the lowest risk computing only occurs when the machine is maintained with the most recent OS version and is fully updated. Anti-malware add on software cannot fully compensate for attacks targeting the underlying weaknesses of an old OS. New attacks leveraging old (but recently discovered) bugs and never corrected errors have become common. An old machine is now just a huge risk vector, especially if it is connected directly to the raw Internet, even for a short while.

User behavior, even sometime long in the past, is of course always a risk. Allow some piece of badware to be installed at any time and you are cooked, even if you don't realize it. Old OS just makes it harder to detect, let alone correct or defend against, even for moderately savvy users.