device has used 9.5GB of Blackberry data! Blackberry APN question
 

So a user on BIS with Vodafone UK has received a huge bill of over £9,000.

The charges are for Blackberry usage, in the UK. He has 500mb of Blackberry data bundled in, anything on top is charged on a per mb basis (still trying to find out the per mb cost)

It turns out that in 30 days they have chewed through 9.5GB of Blackberry data. this is data that has come through the Blackberry.net APN not the standard Vodafone UK internet APN which provides general usage.

This means it's not being caused by tethering, or any other method, it must have been transferred by the device. Also the user has mentioned that they have noticed the battery needs charging every 6 to 8 hours which would make sense if it's transferring boatloads of megabytes

I don't have the device yet but I will have it tomorrow to try and diagnose the problem.

checking for any applications installed is the obvious check, however I'm not sure what kind of application would download (and then discard) so much information, even after several hard resets (caused by the battery dying)

Also Can any third party application connect through the Blackberry APN? or does it have to be a verified developer (things like the facebook and google apps etc)

there is no point asking for more information from Voda as this is all traffic through the Blackberry.net APN so Voda can't see anything other than traffic coming and going between the handset and the gateway to the Blackberry NOC.

I doubt RIM will provide any information on the data such as destination IP's as they won't even give you the time of day unless it's requested by a carrier.

I have been to the UK NOC I know they control BIS bandwidth very closely, ALL app traffic and browsing goes through their systems.

Finally does anyone know of any applications that can analyse traffic coming in and out of the device, provide information on the process or part of the OS that's requesting traffic?

Re: device has used 9.5GB of Blackberry data! Blackberry APN question
 

The only way to use 9.5gb of data, that I can think of is downloading lots of files (like music) or watching youtube a lot. I can't imagine any app other than a streaming radio app - or youtube that can use that amount of data. Youtube could easily use 5 times that much, if they were watching for a few hours a day. And streaming radio is VERY heavy for data.

So, find out what new apps they've installed and also find out if anyone else has been using the BB.

My son got on mine and used up 2/3 of my data plan in 2 days - only way I knew, was my carrier has a data tracking app that gets pushed to the phone, when you first pop in the SIM card in a fresh OS install.

Sadly, I have not yet found a data tracking app - and it's high time there was one. Built-in.
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Re: device has used 9.5GB of Blackberry data! Blackberry APN question
 

Ok so I have the handset now. It's a blackberry Torch. This user also has an iPhone4 which is their main phone for everyday use. The have a Blackberry purely for e-mail and bbm usage. (footballers with too much money eh?)

He has only 1 third party application which is Whatsapp, I can see through appworld that he has previously had pingchat but has uninstalled it again.

Whatsapp was installed back in September according to the application properties.

I managed to find an application called network traffic control. It can monitor incoming and outcoming traffic it also seperates it out between wi-fi and radio usage.

I put my own blackberry enabled sim into the device and left it for a couple of hours. It used a grand total of 20Kb

I very much doubt that the 9.5GB of usage was something that the user was doing on the device. looking at the data it was 24/7, it was generating traffic all through the night while the user was asleep and while they working and the phone was in the changing rooms locked up.

I have been searching google and found a few examples of people having similar problems. They had got a torch and suddenly their usage went through the roof.

Re: device has used 9.5GB of Blackberry data! Blackberry APN question
 

The torch offers a browser which is capable of rendering websites with near desktop quality. While some people love this, it will multiply your data usage compared to the blackberry 8000 age by dimensions.
Add a fast 3G connection, and you are able to reach a few gigabytes without problems.

I made a litte statistics:
I choosed a normal newspaper website (the german spiegel.de)
Load that with default settings (enable java, enable images, enable embedded media. block popup windows).

This will be 1.6MB, just, for the main page.
With BIS compression, it will still be 800KB
I checked other random news sites. 1MB to 1.2MB with BIS compression
to reach 9GB, you have to load such a page only 12 times an hour.

Now, find a page with an evil java script, which refreshes the page every N minutes, and, put the browser in the background.

Use a blackberry 8000 instead, disable images, and javascript.
The spiegel newspaper page will consume only 50KB - this is a factor of about 1:25.

This does not mean that it happend like I guessed. But it is possible, even without music or video streaming to suck a gigantic amount of data, just by using the browser which comes with OS6.

Re: device has used 9.5GB of Blackberry data! Blackberry APN question
 

1.2 MB is 0.0012GB to get to 9GB you'd have to load 7500 times. 12 times an hour would be 625 hours. Which would be loading a page of that size 12 times EVERY hour for 26 days straight.

Re: device has used 9.5GB of Blackberry data! Blackberry APN question
 

correct. If the page does that itself and has the "nocache" pragma, it seems at least possible - I have to tried that, and 9GB/month is really huge, But, a similar thing happend to a customer of me. Not with gigabytes, but in the megabytes range.