I have an M-budget phone (service, invoices are from Swisscom) with 500 Mb of data/month. I'm hyper-paranoid about not running out of data because once I had to pay a 5 franc 'penalty' and it pissed me off.
* When I get into a wifi zone I switch the 3g off.
* I check the remaining data pretty often.
* In a normal week my only 3g use is on the train because I have wifi at home and at work.
Late last month I was a bit stunned to realise I only had 45mb to last me 5 days. So I went into hyper-hyper-insane-stingy mode. That worked as expected for a couple days.
On the 27th at 10:36 I had 34Mb left. I switched 3g on for a second to check my email, then got into a wifi zone.
At 11:11 I got a mail saying I had run out of data. Huh?!
I forgot to mention that at the start of every month I reset my data usage stats to zero. So I know how much my phone thinks I use - it was 350 Mb. Swisscom are saying I used 150 Mb more than I actually did.
I decided to just write it off and wait for the next month to roll around - (not that unhealthy to check my phone less often anyway.) But today I got the bill and they are charging me for 80 Mb of *extra* data.
WHAT?! I had my 3g switched off for the whole rest of the month!
Just now I checked the status so far this month - my phone says I've used 24.8 Mb - Swizzcom say I've used 54.77.
I am irritated.
Can anyone shed light on this? Should I burst into their office and have a freakout? Or is there some insane technical garbage that explains it?
Swisscom have their own wifi which your phone will automatically connect to. It's a pisser because (a) the phone stats correctly don't record it as 3/4G so you can't check your actual usage and (b) some apps can be told to only go online with wifi and this fools them.
I'm on Swisscom and never go near my 500M monthly limit (and if it did I'd simply lose data) but when I saw the phone connect to wifi in the middle of nowhere, I went into my settings on my iPhone and unselected the "connect automatically" option for that wifi. I think there are two that it uses.
https://www.swisscom.ch/content/dam/...connection.pdf
Huh! That would explain it, I think.
From that link you included:
"The iPhone connects to the high-speed
Wi-Fi network automatically as soon
as a Swisscom hot spot is within range.
The data volume used is calculated
straight away like data traffic on the
mobile network."
This is CRAZY to me. I hate this stuff! Why would any reasonable person see that their phone was connected to wifi and think 'oh it's not really wifi, it's mobile data!'
Anyway, at least I (think I) understand what happened, and how to fix it (wait till my phone connects to a S-com wifi and tell it not to connect). SIGH.
Thanks Adrian!
There are
Swisscom Public WLAN hotspots all over the place, e.g. in train stations.
If you have a Vivo Casa package or a Swisscom DSL at home (or a Natel mobile plan, which is not the case with the OP), you can use these hotspots for free (with some plans, there are some data and/or speed limits, see link above.)
If you have such a plan, you could maybe try to manually register to the WLAN "Swisscom" with the credentials of your Swisscom Login (as opposed to using your M-Budget login, if there is such a thing).
I have a Swisscom SIM in my iPad, and I find that even when connected to a Swisscom wifi hotspot - with cellular turned off - usage still depletes my data quota.
For my mobile, I use Aldi Swiss Mobile, and even for PAYG, I can view online an itemised record of calls and data usage (I buy a monthly amount, but it still shows volume used in KB ).
What I notice, throughout the day, is many listings of just a few KB (mainly double figures - but even some single figures and some triple ones).
This is outside of when I am consciously connecting. I can only guess that this usage is for things like checking mailbox, weather updating, position updating, and other app. 'needs' ...... most of which can probably be adjusted or turned off when not on wifi in individual app. settings.
Over the course of the month, these low usage entries can mount up - whether sufficiently to account for the discrepancies mentioned in the OP is another matter.
Yes, the EAPSIM wifi thing from Swisscom uses your data allowance.
This is particularly crap on an iPhone because you can't block apps from using "mobile" data if the phone thinks you're on wifi.
I turned it off (disabled auto-connect) as soon as they got decent 3G and 4G coverage in Zurich HB and one or two other places.
The only use I ever found for it was connecting my wifi-only iPad sometimes.
There's a couple of tips on preventing the connection on this thread. It's old, but I guess it should still work (I'm pretty sure mine still doesn't connect after all this time)
Preventing Connection to Swisscom Hotspot
Thanks, everyone. I hope that's problem solved.
It's odd that it only noticeably affected me in the last couple of weeks but I'll just assume they've added some hotspots somewhere on my route.
What Swisscom thought would offload its cellular network has to be avoided because stupid iPhone cannot block all paid data service. Or because Swisscom decided to charge for it like for gold.
Er, yes it can. Just turn of wifi and cellular data, and only activate it as and when needed.
Ok, this probably won't work for the whatsapp, Facebook, push email people, but for those of us who only need Internet as and when it can stop that data usage counter ticking up
I have an unlimited service so the data I use is irrelevant, but I do manually deactivate Internet when not needed as a battery saving method.
Edit: LOL and there's me forgetting the forget network option which I mentioned in Mirf's linked thread.