By LETRE SWEETING

Tribune Staff Reporter

lsweeting@tribunemedia.net

ARE you losing data too quickly? The problem could be your phone’s Wi-Fi settings or usage habits, says Dwayne Davis, Chief Information Officer for the Cable Bahamas Group of Companies.

Mr Davis said Aliv’s network is not responsible for quick data expiration, an issue about which customers sometimes complain.

“We have been advised by persons where they said, ‘my data went fast,’ or the data would go after they would have paid for data,” he said yesterday. “Upon investigation, we realised that the usage was valid.”

“A lot of the data usage, for example, is updates. If you’re an iPhone user, as you know, Apple pushes out a lot of updates and then people would backup to iCloud. So it’s been scenarios like that where we’ve had those type of scenarios from persons.”

Mr Davis said Aliv’s network is fast, which may mean data usage happens quickly.

“I think because of the speed, persons use quite a bit of data,” he said. “What we actually did last year was we actually slowed down our network to try and minimise it.

“For example, you go on YouTube or you go on Instagram and the performance is excellent. So the more you do, the more you go, the more you go, so we actually slowed down the network to try and accommodate it, because the data would go fast.

He added: “There’s really nothing wrong with our network. I think the persons’ usage habits really plays a role.”

Mr Davis said one customer reported that 90 per cent of their data was used up 20 minutes after a plan was purchased.

“For that particular user, what happened was at midnight, Apple does updates,” he said, “so when I did a deep dive on that particular user, we realised that all of the data uses were valid. They were specifically to iCloud or Apple updates.

“So what will happen is that if an update was running on your mobile and you run out of data, if you were to replace that data, it would finish the process, but you need to look at the plan that person is using. So if you buy a $6 plan, that’s like three gigabytes of data.

“So for that particular case, on midnight, they would have used 1.7 or 1.8 gigabytes, which is more than 50 per cent of the three gigabytes they would have bought.

“So, every concern, I personally investigate it with my team, and we verify that it was actual data usage.”

He said users should check their phone’s Wi-Fi settings.

“Another misconception is that persons feel that because they’re home on Wi-Fi, that they’re not using data,” he said. “Now here’s the thing, with an iPhone or high-end Android, like a Samsung, they will use the stronger network.

“So if you’re on Wi-Fi and your Wi-Fi signal is weaker than the cellphone signals, it’s automatically going to defer to the stronger connection, but there are settings that you can actually change to force it to only use Wi-Fi. So it has nothing to do with the system. The system doesn’t steal data. The system is not configured to take your data. Those are all valid use cases.”