Data Usage

[BRICROUSH81]

I would love a legitimate response as to why, when over all the years of service averaging 7GB, why am I now supposedly using 12GB. Nothing has changed so why suddenly is my data being used faster then ever before?

[Ann154]

Have you looked at the data usage on the phone and determine which applications are using the most?

[cmeisinger]

I would like to know the same thing something isn't right I average 3.7 and have never reached 5Gb I have a 6Gb plan and I just received notification that I am at 90% of my data and 3 days left in the cycle?  No way I have hardly used anything and when I look at the usage I am seeing hits overnight when I am asleep and on my home wireless and I have the wi-fi assist off.

[BRICROUSH81]

Yes I have looked at my usage. I have 2 phones on my acct and one of which is school aged so you'd think the usage would be going down as he doesn't take his phone to school.  I too have usage through all hours of the day and night...I work outside of home and have wifi @ home sooo...Why am I being charged when we are both @ home? I am seeing this question a lot lately so clearly we aren't the only ones w/ data usage jumping thru the roof, which makes me very much question what Verizon is doing.   I am at 3gb & my plan begins on the 6th of the month, so in 10 days we've used 3 gigs?  I HIGHLY doubt that...

It doesn't make sense at all; I've had the same plan, same 2 phones on plan for several years and we NEVER come close to our 10 gigs..literally nothing has changed.

We probably won't get a straight answer so thank you for both responses. My contract is up in November and I'm looking around as I feel I pay way too much already then, whatever they are doing to make the data sky rocket will be the icing on the cake.

[sprmankalel · Accepted solution]

There are MANY threads about this topic. You may not have changed your habits but your apps have been updated and they are streaming higher quality audio and video.

When the app is streaming higher quality it uses more data. Check your video and audio streaming apps settings and change them to stream lower quality. You won't notice a real difference and you will use less data.

Please search the forum for other threads with these questions.

[vzw_customer_support]

BRICROUSH81-

I'm saddened to read that you are thinking about breaking up with Verizon. We aren't ready to say goodbye. I know how important it is to manage and monitor the data on your account and we have some awesome tools that help: http://vz.to/26brIep. Additionally, in the last few months we have made some exciting changes to our network, one of which is our LTE Advanced, this provides some of the fastest data speeds in the industry. If you have a qualifying phone and in a city that supports LTE Advanced, you may notice that your data speeds have gotten much faster, which could equate to higher than normal data usage. Your device also displays where your data is going, what make/model phone do you use? Lastly, you mentioned that you are on wifi frequently, which is awesome! When your phone is attached to wifi, do you completey disable your mobile data? If not, I recommend doing so, if there is an interruption in the wireless network, it will revert to your mobile data. We're here to help turn things around! Please let us know the make/model phone and we can better assist.

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[smith6612]

Also worth noting, it's not always the apps which change. In some areas, Verizon's been rolling out LTE-A and additional cell sites to bring up their cell density and performance a bit. As a result, many apps will start defaulting to higher quality video as greater capacity is enabled. But with that said, Verizon hasn't exactly been dropping the prices of data with this extra capacity, so it's not as if they're hurting.

The unfortunate part of this is, many apps don't provide controls for limiting bandwidth usage. They just use whatever they feel like using. So there's another side effect to the apps playing videos.

Also, watch out for GIFs. They may seem innocent and harmless, but I've seen pages on Tumblr and other editorial sites consume tens of Megabytes on a single GIF. For some reason a fad from the 90s is back, and sites don't want to use the more efficient HTML5 Video standard to play back animated imaged. What's worse is, browsers can often be told to not auto-play videos. But those GIFs are going to load unless you filter out all .gif from the get go using a content/ad blocker.