Hot Spot Data Use When Idle

Belgique wrote:
Thanks folks! I foolishly changed plans to get a 5S and lost my unlimited because I rarely hit even 2 gigs. Now I'm hitting too many no wifi CG's and am eating Gigs like crazy. I don't down load videos etc but stuff kept eating. I turned off Dropbox syncs, Carbonite uploads, auto start videos, MS updates, etc., so I think I'm better. It's easy to turn off the hotspot but I get lazy.

Lesson: if you have unlimited data, don't give it up!

Could you have just bought the phone outright and kept your old plan?
Just wondering.

sdianel wrote:
change your browser setting so that videos don't auto play. That helped me a LOT!

ditto!

Thanks folks! I foolishly changed plans to get a 5S and lost my unlimited because I rarely hit even 2 gigs. Now I'm hitting too many no wifi CG's and am eating Gigs like crazy. I don't down load videos etc but stuff kept eating. I turned off Dropbox syncs, Carbonite uploads, auto start videos, MS updates, etc., so I think I'm better. It's easy to turn off the hotspot but I get lazy.

Lesson: if you have unlimited data, don't give it up!

change your browser setting so that videos don't auto play. That helped me a LOT!

We use our grandfathered VERIZON MIFI Plan from back in 2010 which is a 3GB DATAPLAN. I think their lowest offered dataplan now is a 5GB service. This allows up to five of our WIFI enabled devices to be used at the same time.

I don't think we have ever gone over our 3GB limit in one month with it but we do watch it like a hawk and check the dataplan status everyday before we use it...

We only use ours for checking emails, checking in with the kids, paying some bills and some surfing the internet. I think it is known that just down-streaming one movie will eat up over 1GB of data so we have never done any of that.

Roy Ken

It uses very, very little data if you are truly doing very little. However, there are so many things running in the background that you might be surprised how much data you use "doing nothing". However, if you make no particular adjustments other than turning off the hotspot, as soon as you log in again the computer/phone/tablet will download what it missed anyway.