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Data Roaming with Multiple Devices
Data Roaming with Multiple Devices
If you’re anything like us you travel with a plethora of devices, for us it’s 2 x iPhones, 2 x iPads and 2 x Laptops. And because we live so much online then data roaming is almost an inevitability.
We have a multiple device plan with EE which allows us to have 5 devices on the same plan, that’s the 4 x iOS devices above and a MiFi unit. That all sounds great as we can just arrive anywhere, find the best place for the MiFi to get a signal and connect all the devices to it, but we very quickly realised that we were munching through our data allowance VERY quickly and we couldn’t work out why.
With EE, in Europe we get 100Mb for £2, not too bad, but we were using 5-8 units (£10-£16) a day.
The reasons are quite simple had we given them a moment’s thought.
Firstly, and most obviously, many of our devices share the same functionality: Email, Facebook, Twitter etc etc and we compound this because SIubhan and I also share multiple email accounts. As an example, when an email comes into ramblers@wonderingabout, this is a shared email account so it is downloaded 6 times!!! Really? Do we need to download that email 6 times? No we don’t.
So to resolve this we got some disciplines going for when we’re off wi-fi:
– We use specific devices for specific tasks. E.g. We use the iPhones for Social Media and we switch off Twitter, Facebook, Instagram on the iPad. In fact there’s a lot we switch off on the iPad
On an iOS device, it’s not enough just to close down the app, you need to go into the mobile data settings and turn nearly everything off!
SETTINGS – MOBILE DATA – USE MOBILE DATA FOR: On the laptops it’s not too bad because it’s all browser driven, but we also temporarily disable the non-work email accounts because we will have already seen and responded to most of them on the iPhones. If we open the mail app on the Laptop, it is invariably to respond in detail to a client issue and that’s going to be the work email account.
Now here’s the big gotcha….
Again, obvious when you think about it. If you set-up a MiFi device and connection, all your devices believe they’re on wi-fi and all your carefully crafted disciplines about are circumvented because ,on wi-fi, your devices behave differently and open many more data connections. Everything you switched off on “USE MOBILE DATA FOR” is now on, because your iPad/iPhone thinks it is on wi-fi and is fooled into believing that it’s an all-you-can-eat data buffet. It took us a while to work this one out.