Solved Data Usage on Wifi high

[ruinah]

I have a strange issue with my SP3 that I am having a hard time tracking down. I hit a meeting once a week where I turn on Wifi tethering on my phone. I use a local copy of Outlook and have that open and may do some very light browsing to look something up. Otherwise I am fairly idle. Problem is during that hour my tethering eats up 500mb in data. My SP3 is synchronized before I ever walk into the meeting, I am the only person connected to the phone for tethering. What it almost seems like is when my SP3 sees that Tether network, something must kick in to start syncing that doesn't sync over normal wifi. Doesn't make any sense to me. I don't see anything out of the ordinary happening but something must be running somewhere. Either that, or the data usage on the phone is reporting bad data maybe. Phone is a Galaxy S5. Anyone ever seen something like this before?

 

[Wierdninja]

Are you tracking the amount of data over wifi also?

 

[jnjroach]

Not a great solution, but if you dual boot the Windows 10 Preview it adds the Windows Phone Datasense Control Panel and you can see what is using you data...

Another option is to use data packet analysis tool to capture what's going on, Wireshark is one of classic tools...

 

[daniielrp]

Are you tracking the amount of data over wifi also?

I second this, set the connection as a "Metered" one - this will switch off most background things like OneDrive synch/windows updates etc to reduce usage and it will also tell you how much data the connection has used.

I do this with my MiFi:

 

[nipponham]

I second daniielrp's post. It will treat that network as metered and limit data usage to a minimum. Before you do that, you can long press your mobile network SSID and verify that it indeed went through 500MB as reported by your phone.

 

[ruinah]

thanks folks, I will set it to meter (completely forgot about that feature) and see what I see. I suppose I can watch task manager in networking also and try to see what is going on there. It's just so strange.

 

[GreyFox7]

Use Resource Monitor instead of Task Manager you can get more detail about what's doing what or Performance Monitor is also available.

 

[ruinah]

Took me a while to sort this out. The culprit was One Note. I use some shared notebooks and it was constantly trying to synchronize. It was using 1-2mb/s at times trying to keep up I guess. I made it manual sync from now on and only sync it up a couple times a day (when not tethering). It used a gigabyte in data yesterday even though that much was never changed in the notebooks. Seems pretty buggy to me. When I killed One Note and let it sit and used the surface, for 4 hours I only used about 120mb of data and that was a ton of browsing and email usage with Outlook. I guess One Note is just data hungry?