Amazon Echo - Data Usage!!!

OldAgeTravellers

OldAgeTravellers

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I recently bought an Amazon Echo Dot at half price on their Black Friday Week deal. And my initial reaction is good, even SWMBO said this morning, it's nice to be woken by the radio in the mornings. So I have ordered another while still on offer.
Well, we live in the mountains in rural south of France and can't, & probably never will get Broadband. But for about five months have been using a fairly new service here that is only available in mountain areas which uses the 4G mobile network, we just happen to have line of sight to their mast about 10km away and have been getting blistering speeds of about 60mb up & down!
Well we have a very generous cap of 200GB after which we are limited to a very low speed ok for very limited use only, all for just €30 p.m. We have never used more than about 25GB in a month so far. Well I happened to look at our usage yesterday and was staggered to find that we had already used 147GB and we still have ten days of the month to go. Then midday today having only done a bit of emails and surfing I got an email to say we had used all 200gB so 53gB in about 24hours and were now limited to a speed of 256kB.
Anybody else discovered this? Have I got the settings wrong somewhere. I have only been playing the radio from TuneIn for an hour this morning while we had a cuppa in bed, nothing else that I can remember. So is this thing chunking data up and down all the time. Anybody got one who can actually properly monitor the traffic?
I thought it could be useful in the van as a good quality BlueTooth speaker if I can find the slightly unusual plug to use it from 12volt, but not too sure now if it is even worth keeping.
This is the one we have the mk3 I think. Very good speakers and 4 microphones.
61u48FEs0rL._SY355_.jpg
 
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I've got one - but as I'm on [expensive] landline & broadband... I've never thought about data usage.

I wonder if being new, it was doing some sort of software upgrade but even so, it's a lot of data to be using... 53gb in 24h...

...off to see what the Googleverse has to say...


Edited:
So the consensus, once you weed out the conspiracy theorists, is it uses very little data when in standby, or even when answering questions, a few kb.
It is more hungry when playing streaming music - it appears to download a couple of tracks in mp3 format, playing the first, having the second in a buffer, before downloading the next...
No way should it have chewed through 53gb.
 
Last edited:
In France then. No doubt we will soon see thousands of yellow Hi-Vi's blocking roads and ports until you get unlimited WiFi.

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Langtoftlad said:
I've got one - but as I'm on [expensive] landline & broadband... I've never thought about data usage.

I wonder if being new, it was doing some sort of software upgrade but even so, it's a lot of data to be using... 53gb in 24h...

...off to see what the Googleverse has to say...


Edited:
So the consensus, once you weed out the conspiracy theorists, is it uses very little data when in standby, or even when answering questions, a few kb.
It is more hungry when playing streaming music - it appears to download a couple of tracks in mp3 format, playing the first, having the second in a buffer, before downloading the next...
No way should it have chewed through 53gb.
Click to expand...
Interesting, maybe it would be better to load Radio 2 from TuneIn on my phone and send to the Echo via Bluetooth. Seems to defeat the object though.
Steve
 
PhilandMena said:
In France then. No doubt we will soon see thousands of yellow Hi-Vi's blocking roads and ports until you get unlimited WiFi.
Click to expand...
Doubt it, they are only interested in what hits their pockets. Nobody is bothered about a few people living in the mountains. We would have broadband except the Mayor will not pay for 4km of fibre and a cabinet for about thirty scattered houses. I suspect that our deal is subsidised by the government privately so they can say 90% can get broadband.
 
Unfortunately, there seems to be a fair few reports of this humongous data usage but apart from incredulity, little of any help :(.
Suggestions that your mobile provider is miss-logging is hardly likely to be believed.
Some suggestions that they might have a hardware fault & should be returned :unsure:.

I can't imagine what yours is doing... avg 2.20gb/hour - as a comparison, Netflix streams video on medium quality at about 0.75gb/h and that's video not audio.
 
Langtoftlad said:
I've found a discussion on an Amazon forum that suggests that some users are experiencing the same issue as you have - but sadly little explanation or resolution.
https://www.amazonforum.com/forums/devices/echo-alexa/464946-how-much-data-does-alexa-echo-dot-use

Can you do a hard reboot back to factory settings?
Is it actually working despite your crippled bandwidth?
Click to expand...
I disconnected it as soon as I got the email so as not to be cut off for abnormal use. But have just plugged it in and yes it works and even plays BBC2 from TuneIn. So it doesn't need a great deal of data.

Just had a thought though, I bought a FireStick at half price, I wonder if that has been doing something odd.

I bought a new Linksys router just before we got the 4G box, we had useless and expensive satellite before that. What I could do is to set up a second wireless network just to connect the Amazon Stuff to I think I should be able to measure through-put through that.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Steve
 
"It's nice to be woken by the radio in the mornings!" We've got an alarm clock that does that. I don't think it cost £30 all in, let alone every month!!!
 
Deneb said:
"It's nice to be woken by the radio in the mornings!" We've got an alarm clock that does that. I don't think it cost £30 all in, let alone every month!!!
Click to expand...
Even better to not be woken up by any gadget and leave it to nature. Ah,the joys of being retired.:D;)
 
Deneb said:
"It's nice to be woken by the radio in the mornings!" We've got an alarm clock that does that. I don't think it cost £30 all in, let alone every month!!!
Click to expand...
I'v got an old one like that as well but it can't get Radio2 from the south of France. Have you tried listening to French Radio, for me as is the TV, DIRE:eek:
 
OldAgeTravellers said:
Just had a thought though, I bought a FireStick at half price, I wonder if that has been doing something odd.
Click to expand...
That'll be it - Amazon video runs from about 1gb/h to 3gb/h on HD.
I'd suspect that when you stop watching, the Firestick isn't, and continues to stream.

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OldAgeTravellers said:
I'v got an old one like that as well but it can't get Radio2 from the south of France. Have you tried listening to French Radio, for me as is the TV, DIRE:eek:
Click to expand...

Be careful what you wish for. You might end up listening to Jeremy Vine :cry:
 
@OldAgeTravellers
Might be worth a read through
http://www.aftvnews.com/amazon-fire...-and-alert-you-when-youve-reached-a-data-cap/

especially this comment
...and that the high usage was due to Amazon downloading things you might like.

They said to either put it in sleep mode or just unplug the stick from the power source.
Unplugging from the power source means completely disconnecting ALL the parts of the stick:
I just unplugged it from the tv and my t-mobile hot spot still showed it was connected to the hot spot. When I unplugged all the parts, it disconnected from the hot spot. Inconvenient, but stopped my data usage to the tune of 30GB per month
 
Langtoftlad said:
@OldAgeTravellers
Might be worth a read through
http://www.aftvnews.com/amazon-fire...-and-alert-you-when-youve-reached-a-data-cap/

especially this comment
...and that the high usage was due to Amazon downloading things you might like.

They said to either put it in sleep mode or just unplug the stick from the power source.
Unplugging from the power source means completely disconnecting ALL the parts of the stick:
I just unplugged it from the tv and my t-mobile hot spot still showed it was connected to the hot spot. When I unplugged all the parts, it disconnected from the hot spot. Inconvenient, but stopped my data usage to the tune of 30GB per month
Click to expand...
Thanks Stephen for doing the Googling for me. That doesn't sound good at all. It is firmly disconnected now. In fact I was wondering what use it would be to me now having used it. Prime although cheaper here is pretty useless most deliveries even with Prime take a week. I bought something today which said one day delivery is scheduled for delivery on Saturday and will probably be Monday because the driver can't be bothered to drive up the mountain. If the TV stick uses so much data again it is not really worth it. I thought I would be able to do screen sharing with it but it doesn't appear to work from the iPad, it does from my Android phone though.
Thanks again,
Steve
 
OldAgeTravellers said:
thought I would be able to do screen sharing with it but it doesn't appear to work from the iPad, it does from my Android phone though.
Thanks again,
Click to expand...
You can screen mirror from an iPad to a firestick with an app downloaded to the stick called Airplay — something something! Then just press screen mirror on iPad. Also if you press home twice on firestick you can put it to sleep & stop data usage.

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Stonemags76 said:
Also if you press home twice on firestick you can put it to sleep & stop data usage.
Click to expand...
This apparently is the proper process but some users are reporting that for some reason their Firestick doesn't go to sleep and can download a whole lot of content that it thinks you might like... and the only solution is to isolate the entire unit from power & wifi.
 
Yes, thanks for that, I tried putting the FireStick to sleep but it stayed connected to the network so I unplugged the power supply but it stayed connected to the network presumably with power from the HDMI socket. So the advice seems to be totally remove it. I do not have enough data now to test it but after the 9th I will work out a way to test exactly what each is doing. Thanks for the input.
Steve
 
Common problem..Its not unusual for someone to piggyback your connection and use up your valuable gb.Check
with your provider where the gb went and then work back from there.I had a relative who used to do this.download tons of movies then go down to mojacar in spain to watch them.also unplug router on a night time..hope this helps
 

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