ATT-International Data Usage-Need help!
 

I was in France and dutifully turned off #G and Cellular Data access-except for a 15 minute period during which I tried (unsuccessfully) to access my desktop using linkedin. No other "data" calls were made.
My Iphone showed that I sent 4.0GB and received 0 bytes for my entire seven day trip.
If I understand the pricing plan correctly I will be charged $20k or so!
I have a hard time believing that I could have sent 4 GB.
I contacted a service rep on my return (the next day) who could not find any unusual activity and said that no excess usage notification had been sent by AT&T.
Anybody have a similar experience?
How do I fight AT&T if it comes to that?

Why don't you log into your AT&T account and check the date/time of your data usage? It will show you when the activity took place, and there is no way you could have used 4GB in just 15 minutes. AT&T charges about $20/MB when roaming - 4 GB would come to about $80k.

Did you reset your data usage on the phone right before you traveled or how do you know that the 4GB is correct? Like already said, that's a lot for just 15 mins of usage. Plus, it should have shown on your account online by now.

I reset the phone to 0 before leaving on this trip.
I only activated 3g/cellular data this one time.
I do not have access to the corporate account info (this is a company phone, not personal).

The sent 4 gb and received none is very bizarre. Also, I don't use that much in a month on my iPhone, much less a week. Do you have iCloud backups activated? Could it have backed up your phone to the cloud when you activated data? That could account for a massive data send.

No backups of any kind!

Which version of the iPhone?

the 2s, bought about 18 months ago

Okay. I'm stumped. I don't even remember what a 2s is. But I doubt it had any built in cloud stuff turned on by default. The other potential inadvertent data use I know of is from location services. But I expect that would be mostly received data, not sent.

How does one go about arguing with AT&T?
The iphone 2 was the second generation if that matters, and I never had anything similar happen before.

If it is the iphone 1 (which is listed as 2) then you might just have a problem with the OS. The older os showed ALL DATA usage, including WIFI in the settings/usage area, whereas since I think 4.0 (now on 5.0.1) they only show cellular data usage in that area.

I'd say do not worry until you hear from them. That kind of roaming usage would have flagged your account, and they would have contacted you.

I guess you were right.
The bill (covering Oct. 24-Nov. 23) from AT&T has arrived and did not show any unusual charges.
The only remaining possibility is that the data charges (Nov. 21, Paris) were delayed and show up on the next cycle.
I have no idea if this is likely.

Int'l often will show up up to three billing cycles later, but I still think you're probably in the clear.

From a purely practical perspective this doesn't sound possible to me so you should be fine. Assuming a consistent 3G signal and an uplink speed of 1Mbps (that's being optimistic) it would take just over 9 hours of full utilization to send 4GB of data. It is categorically not possible in a 15min period.

You won't have to but your defense against AT&T if it ever happened would start with making a request for the logs showing the data sessions, servers accessed, etc.