Two Android smartphones on a 1 GB data plan, no streaming, no YouTube, no music, on WiFi at home and at children's houses, settings to manually update apps from Google Play Store on wifi only.
I monitor our data usage almost daily via my account on my PC, and record it on a chart and a graph.
I dial DATA occasionally and get a text that reports my total data usage.
At home, we might use 50 to 100 MB in a week, combined.
While away, we use a phone as a hotspot to read news on a tablet, and may use 200 to 300 MB over a weekend.
The previous billing period, we were up to 950 MB total at the end of the last day of the billing period, information I got from My Account via my PC. A text message received after 9 pm on the last day as a result of dialing DATA confirmed that we had used 950 MB. We were home the entire time before and after the end of the billing period, on WiFi. We have PCs and WiFi connected tablets. We don't use our smartphones at home for data intensive apps, not even weather.
Yet the bill comes in stating that we used 1100 MB of data and charges us a $20 overage.
How in the world can AT&T come up with a 150 MB difference overnight?
We were home, we were on WiFi, we were not using our phones for anything but calls and texts, and the last text from AT&T, dated 9;16 pm the day the billing period closed, confirmed that our data usage was 950 MB. We were asleep the rest of the night. Even the app we are using to silence the phone on a schedule from 9:30 pm to 5 am has a setting to turn off data during that time.
Something is wrong. Why the discrepancy in our usage and our bill? Any ideas?
I know the bills are entirely computer generated and there's no little gremlin in the AT&T system adding bogus charges to the bills. But whatever the problem, if it's on the AT&T side, should be fixed. It's misleading to show a certain amount of data usage and then have an unaccounted spike appear.
BTW, a call to AT&T Customer Support and the $20 overage charge was removed.