Data allowance on iPhone

[oxcat1]

I know this is a really stupid question but please can someone explain how I 'use' data?

I received a text from Orange this morning to say that I have overshot their 'fair use' policy this month. This is no great surprise as I'm in hospital at the moment so pretty much living on the iPhone at the moment

this text said that if I used more than 100mb over the next 10 days my speed would be reduced so I cleared my network usage statistics to keep an eye on it. Basically my phone has racked up 10mb of downloads just this afternoon, and I deliberately wasn't using it! Until now, obviously! I've spent maybe 25 minutes on the internet and checked email a couple of times, but that's hardly heavy. I even turned off 3G to try and reduce usage.

Where am I going wrong? I'm not watching tv/films/YouTube or listening or downloading music or anything, just facebook and browsing.

Please help!

No idea but have you tried phoning them to explain that you're in hospital, hence the unusually high usage.

Are any of your apps downloading info?

I get 1gb of data download in my contract, as part of the fair usage, but have never got anywhere near that so far despit using my iPhone out and about a ffair bit, such as when geocaching.

I did, and they were very sweet and said it was unlikely anything would actually happen and that the text was automatic etc etc.

I just don't understand how I rack up data allowance without doing all the things that people say are high usage? Have I got some bizarre setting turned on or something? I mean, I've used at least 10% of the remaining allowance in a few hours of not using it. Is this normal?

How would I know about the apps? I get push notification about my hotmails and 'words with friends' but I think the others (Guardian, Metro etc) only update if I open them, and I haven't done this afternoon.

What about emails? Could you have been receiving large or lots of emails?

I reset all my usage stats to see if I could help you work what uses the data allowance. Some time later, having done loads and used none, I realised I was on my WiFi.

"Basically my phone has racked up 10mb of downloads just this afternoon"

It may depend on the web sites you visit. I just opened a website with Apple/Mac news and Opera reported nearly 900 KB for just the front page. Now, admittedly it had over 75 images, but even so, it only needs someone to open a few web pages and you can download a few MB while hardly knowing it.

Not sure if Opera is 'allowed' on the iPhone but is a handy browser (and items can be saved and synchronized between different machines, so make a note = or save a bookmark - on one device and when you go to another, and login, your note - or bookmark - will be visible there, too!)

Just found the PM Blog page (which has a lot of photos at present because of a piece about switching FM off and using DAB) was over 2.2 MB (so avoid it, but it may be of interest to any radio enthusiasts interested in the range of radios from 20 to 60 years old!)

You can get "Opera Mini" for the iPhone.

The reason for that is that technically it's not a browser. When you request a web page the software contacts Opera's own server who do the browsing for you, create the page, compress the page and then send it to Opera Mini as a single object.

Why do all that?

Well the data sent to and from the mobile gadget is much reduced, one simple page request to Opera and then one compressed object back, compared to normal browsing, many many requests to all sorts of servers returning all sorts of uncompressed things.

Plus it also has the handy side effect of getting around the rules of what Apple allow to run on iPhones.

So basically it's quite neat and meant to be very fast if all you have is a rubbish mobile network connection.

In relation to this it should also help keep the data consumption to a minimum.