cell phone useage??

we have 3 cell phones on our verizon data plan. i have a dumb phone, wife and dottir have i phones. got a text yesterday saying we had used 75% of our 10gb data plan. today i get another text saying we have used 90% of our 10gb plan. aside from the usual phone calls and texts, not much else but an occasional internet search. can these things get hacked or something??

Have ever heard a good word about Verizon. Bunch of thieves.

Allan

We have an 8gb plan for Internet with Verizon. We used to use only about 6gb, sometimes 8. Lately we've been using about 12 and paying penalties. Of course, about 6 months ago my wife discovered Facebook. But--Verizon is our only option for dependable high speed Internet and they know it.

I don't have a Facebook account. When I was sworn in to public office we were advised against participating in any form of social media. Too much of a minefield for a public official.

(quoted from post at 14:32:32 06/08/15) we have 3 cell phones on our verizon data plan. i have a dumb phone, wife and dottir have i phones. got a text yesterday saying we had used 75% of our 10gb data plan. today i get another text saying we have used 90% of our 10gb plan. aside from the usual phone calls and texts, not much else but an occasional internet search. can these things get hacked or something??

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Make sure your phones are set up to search and use a wireless signal whenever possible. Ours connect to the house wireless whenever we are in range. Save a lot of gb's....

(quoted from post at 17:32:32 06/08/15) we have 3 cell phones on our verizon data plan. i have a dumb phone, wife and dottir have i phones. got a text yesterday saying we had used 75% of our 10gb data plan. today i get another text saying we have used 90% of our 10gb plan. aside from the usual phone calls and texts, not much else but an [b:cb5198534d]occasional internet search.[/b:cb5198534d] can these things get hacked or something??

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Well, there's your answer, hard to say how much data is being pulled by your wife and daughter. People get hooked on that stuff. I can't sit at lunch anymore and have a conversation with a few guys without someone googling something they say to prove them wrong or confirm what they're saying. Plus a guy was so proud that he could set his sprinkler system times and function from his smartphone. My question to him: Why?

(quoted from post at 23:24:56 06/08/15) We have an 8gb plan for Internet with Verizon. We used to use only about 6gb, sometimes 8. Lately we've been using about 12 and paying penalties. Of course, about 6 months ago my wife discovered Facebook. But--Verizon is our only option for dependable high speed Internet and they know it.

I don't have a Facebook account. When I was sworn in to public office we were advised against participating in any form of social media. Too much of a minefield for a public official.

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Are you using it for home too? Are you in a 4G area? Have you looked at this? http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/lte-internet-installed/ Data might be a little cheaper for home use.

Also, I think they charge extra for it, but last I heard you can have Verizon cut off data instead of charging you for overages. Might be able to bundle it in with regular phones and shared data, but I haven't checked pricing on that. I'd use this if I didn't have a reasonable regional cell carrier with a 200GB cap.

I've got a 'flip phone' that costs me $11.20 per month on the "pay as you go" plan. I only use it for phone home re;groceries, or expecting a call. Most of the time it stays in the trukk. I have a current balance of $110.00 or 550 minutes ! Those other deals are a waste of time and an insult to folks that like to interact normally. Saw 4 young folks a the local beverage dispenser's last week. Sat down, ordered and out comes the phones - they didn't say more than a dozen words to each other !!

There was a lot of grumbling recently about videos that autoplay when you go to a website. Even if you don't watch the video it downloads the whole thing so your "experience" is more pleasant watching the advertising. Maybe one of them has a web page open in the background and forgot about it?

Bob that could be the NEW QUALITY TIME together. HA HA

I have a 1 Gb plan and have trouble using even 10% of it in the course of a month. I mentioned that to my son in law and he said "well, it helps that you're not a 15 year old girl".

Allan, I'll say a good word about Verizon. I've had them for my cell phone carrier for over 10 years and not had a reason to complain about them. Well, there was one time. I was on a business trip to Ft Knox, Ky, and had no signal. But that was about it.

"I don't have a Facebook account"....Amen to that brother!


I have officially decided that "Facebook" is of the devil! :?

Had Verizon for many years , no issues , They all prey on overages .

I'm OK with Verizon. My first cell phone was with Cellular One, which became part of Verizon later. This was in 1996. I went in the other day and upgraded/changed my plans to include home internet via a modem that sits on my shelf. It's extremely fast and I'm really happy with it. Yes, it's a little more cost, but I'm so tired of having something that's not dependable.

No complaints here except we all want cheaper.

If you have notification you've hit 90 percent, you've probably already gone over due to the delay between when usage is logged and reported.

First thing you need to do is to log in to verizonwireless.com and find out which phone has the usage. (You'll have to set up your account if you haven't done so already.) Then take the offending phone(s) and go to its setting and turn off "mobile data". That will stop all data usage when WiFi is out of range. (If you have WiFi in your home, make sure both phones are set up to use it; that will significantly reduce mobile data usage.) You can turn mobile data back on once you've ended your current billing period.

Smart phones, including the iPhone, are vulnerable to malware, although not as vulnerable as is Windows. Most likely the usage is correct. Things that use up a lot of bandwidth: music and videos. Some sites "push" videos, notably Facebook. There's a way to turn off Facebook's pushed videos. You need to educate your wife and daughter not to leave their phones' browsers sitting on a site that pushes videos. They should close out all the browser windows which are not in use. I leave my smartphone's browser "parked" here on YT, because it's one of the few web sites I use that doesn't push ads and/or videos.

I have a family plan for my wife, son in law, daughter and me. I got a similar message a couple of months ago. My daughter and son in law had just moved to a new home. For some reason, my son in law failed to connect his phone to their wifi in their home. He was thus using his data plan for everything!! Well, that will eat up your data in a heartbeat. As soon as I looked at my plan's usage charts online, I could see it was his phone that was the culprit. He admitted he had "not gotten around to it" when I asked if he was on wifi at home!! 😳

So, my advice is to discover if their phones are connected to a wifi network at home. Any time a phone is using wifi, whether at home or free wifi in an establishment, you are NOT using your data plan.

(quoted from post at 04:45:52 06/09/15) I'm OK with Verizon. My first cell phone was with Cellular One, which became part of Verizon later. This was in 1996. I went in the other day and upgraded/changed my plans to include home internet via a modem that sits on my shelf. It's extremely fast and I'm really happy with it. Yes, it's a little more cost, but I'm so tired of having something that's not dependable.

No complaints here except we all want cheaper.

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Cellular one is what I started with too, 1995 I think. I switched to Tracfone in around 2000 and have been prepaid ever since. Tracfone for over 10 years, then Page Plus, and now Straight Talk for the home phone (all Tracfone companies). All are the same Verizon towers, no overages, and much cheaper. I have a waterproof durable flip phone on the ranch, and I have a smartphone for town, handy to look up stuff, etc. The flip phone costs $30 per YEAR total on Page Plus. The smartphone will cost $85 or so per YEAR total. Both are much more than I use, I had only the $30 a year one for a while and that was more than I used alone.

For a smartphone, the Tracfone is a good deal. You can get a new phone and a year card (1 year activation, 1200 minutes, 1200 texts, 1.2GB data) bundled together, depending on the phone, $100 more or less for -both-. Here's the one I have with the best camera/features that Tracfone had. There's a newer model that's higher but looks similar. http://www.ebay.com/itm/LG-Ultimate...te-Te-xt-Data-Included-Tracfone-/141524483246
You can get a bundle like that with a poor phone for $80. Not bad for a new phone AND a year of service. Qvc.com also sometimes has a similar bundle deal. The phones alone cost that much in stores. Also, Tracfone lets you bring in 4G phones from Verizon if you already have one.

Even if I did talk a lot I'd still have prepaid, full plans are cheaper, plus not much tax with prepaid.

One thing that can use up a lot of data is the auto backup. Pictures taken etc. can be automatically uploaded for backup, sometimes the setting can be changed to only do that on wifi. Most of my neighbors have satellite Internet with a 10GB cap, first thing that gets told to them when I set up a new computer is to never use online backup unless very careful.

It doesn't take much to use a lot of data. Browsing ebay can use over 100 megs an hour depending on the listings. When I was looking for a tractor I was doing over 200 megs an hour sometimes with all the pictures. Didn't do it every day certainly, but say 1 person did an hour a day, that's 6GB a month just looking at web pages. Now add in a family sharing data, using videos (which do a lot more), etc., it goes quickly. If people only look at mainly text sites like forums, then it doesn't use as much of course.

to update, went to the verizon store last nite. we got hacked. wife ordered a new phone last december and it got lost in the ups system. filed a claim but it never went any where. had to buy a replacement phone, this time from the store. first of june, the stolen phone was activated and it hacked our account. they shut down all the phones and did a sim card update thing. did i mention i hate thieves. and to keep it tractor related, i did manage to run over my old phone with the 240 utility and a 5 foot woods cadet brush mower.