Comment by martingordon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martingordon | Hacker News Reader

I accidentally blew through my free 200 MB shortly after signing up for service. I disabled WiFi in order to run a speed test having forgotten that I had a few apps updating in the background and a few minutes later, I got an email saying I ran out of data.

I have 9 days left in my billing period and my Verizon iPad mini and it reports cellular data usage of 422 MB, with 98 MB being System Services. The mini is on WiFi 95% of the time, except when I'm walking to/from school (and I don't carry it every day) carrying it or the WiFi networks I connect to are acting up.

Speed: I'm in Manhattan and I got 5.35 Mbps on T-Mobile LTE, compared to 5-8 Mbps on my AT&T iPhone 5s and 11-21 Mbps on my Verizon iPad mini.

Price: The rates mentioned in the press release apply only to voice customers. If the iPad is your only T-Mobile device, then you're looking at:

  One time passes:
  500 MB for 1 day - $10
  1 GB for 1 week - $15
  2.5 GB for 30 days - $30
  
  Recurring (30 day plans):
  700 MB - $20
  2.7 GB - $30
  4.7 GB - $40

Doesn't the iPad have some way to limit data usage on mobile networks like Android? I can even tell it that certain wifi APs are using mobile data and to conserve bandwidth when connected to them. It works very well, I would imagine Apple has something similar.

You can block individual apps from using the cellular connection, or block cellular data entirely. Unfortunately, there's no way to configure this stuff for WiFi access points that I know of.

Edit: I know it's impolite to complain about downvotes, but I'm genuinely curious. This comment is currently at 0 points, even though I just stated something completely factual without any loaded language whatsoever. What's the deal?

Yeah, I have cellular data for the App Store turned on.

I didn't mean my comment to be a knock against Apple, as it was clearly my fault (first time with a severely limited data cap), but just to illustrate how easy it is to accidentally use up the small amount of free data T-Mobile gives you.

It's a tough problem to solve. Too much control and you overwhelm and annoy the user. Too little and it's easy to use more than you want.

Obviously, the best solution is to magically eliminate the limitations of radio spectrum and give everybody unlimited data.... Until then, I think stories like yours will continue to be common.

Hmm, interesting. Android by default notifies apps that it's on a limited data connection, and they restrict background updates and such. For example, I can install apps from the Play Store on cellular, but they won't auto-update themselves. Same with apps like Pocket, Currents, Google Music (different bitrates for cellular and non-cellular backed wifi, pre-caching), etc. Gmail won't download images/attachments automatically on cellular, but will on wifi. For all of these though, you can usually override this in an individual app's settings, such as telling Google Music to always stream high quality or Gmail to always download attachments.

My tablet barely uses any data (with syncing enabled) in the background on cellular data. This despite having background syncing turned on and quite a few apps that use it. I take it with me most places and do casual browsing on the cellular connection (public transit and airports mostly), and the most I've used was 150MB/month. It just waits to do anything bandwidth intensive until it's back on wifi.

I'm really surprised Apple hasn't done this yet. I guess that's the reason why carriers complain iDevices use so much data.

Android by default notifies apps

So does iOS.

Well, it doesn't, but you can find out.

To be specific about it, iOS has APIs that notify the application (rather than the user) about the device's network state, whether its cellular/wifi/absent. Application developers are expected to control app behavior given this information, but only some subset do.

This is still not quite as fine-grained: Android allows you to specify that some WiFi connections should be treated as 'expensive' in the same way that 3G connections are expensive, so even if you are tethering over WiFi you can still limit your data use. My S3 also has (I'm not certain it's stock) functionality to limit applications' background data use to WiFi only. I've turned that on for a couple of data-hogs.

> Price: The rates mentioned in the press release apply only to voice customers. If the iPad is your only T-Mobile device, then you're looking at:

Per recent news, for the iPad Air and retina Mini this isn't true. The 200MB free data is no-strings attached.

The 200 MB is no strings attached, but the cheaper rates mentioned in the press release do have strings attached. I'm referring in particular to:

> For T-Mobile voice customers, 'always-on' iPad plans start at just $10 a month for unlimited data including 500 MB of 4G LTE data each month. Customers can add even more 4G LTE data in 2 GB increments for just $10 more per month. For customers who would rather have the flexibility of on-demand data, T-Mobile offers daily and weekly passes. Daily passes include unlimited data with 500 MB of 4G LTE data starting at just $5. The weekly passes include unlimited data with 1 GB of 4G LTE data for $10.

Voice customers get $10 off both recurring plans and daily/weekly plans.

In ios7 you can control which apps have access to LTE data. Possibly tweaking those settings will help?

It's a good idea to take a peek regardless. I found an app that I didn't even know was installed, and certainly hadn't run, which was using data in the background (and deleted it)

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