Let's face it - life in the Cooks is expensive and when it comes to cost of internet it is outright astronomical. You cannot blame BlueSky for it - Satellites ain't cheap to get into orbit and someone's got to have to pay the bill and let's not kid oursleves, almost any island nation in the Pacific is too small or too poor to conjure any 'economy of scale'.
Whilst in the rest of the world around us data is a commodity that whilst not free a certain monthly fee buys you some sort of unlimited with no possibility to receive a jaw dropping bill from your provider - in the Cook islands this is a likely horror scenario if you own a fleet of gadgets left at their first world default settings.
Today we look at the coveted iOS devices such as iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch. Sure a nice bling to sport at any occasion but like all other modern gadgets aimed at a first world audience a greedy consumer of Wifi and in some cases 3G data. In a single month this can amount to excess charges that dwarf the investment of getting those things in the first place.
Here are the main culprits that in the Cooks need tinkering to avoid nasty surprises under the banner of 'Bluesky Billing Statement'
Photos:
By default Apple offers their users several Gigabytes of online storage space into which they store small and useful things such as all your Wifi and Email settings. They do however also assume that if you need and can afford an iPhone you must be some high flying business mogul with a flat rated Wifi and Mobile Internet plan everywhere you go. NOT LIKELY for any of us plebs.
Apple believes it has good reason to assume you want to back up and sync ALL of your photos as soon as you snap them. They are by default synched to this 'iCloud' storage space at the first opportunity that presents itself (like the first wifi you connect to) - come home from that party in town where you snapped hundreds of pics and selfies and your iPhone is uploading the whole lot to iCloud before you even had a chance to separate the embarrassing from the ordinary from the keepers.
Worse, if you have multiple devices the same photos then download to all others and so forth.
A real mess and a pricey one at that! Turning this off is the first sensible thing to do after initial setup:
Head to Settings then Photos & Camera and turn off all options presented there. Each one is guaranteed to cost you hundreds within a year and possible more whilst having minimal benefit. Back up you photos to your computer or any other means other than online instead. Post those you want to keep to Facebook and co - that's not a problem, if the App is well written the photo will be scaled down before upload to conserve bandwidth (yeah, right!)
if you want to up the ante you may also have enabled (likely by default) Mobile data for Photos too and your phone will consume your 200 MB monthly allowance in the space of 20 photos at traders and then head straight into bankrupting excess charges before you even stumble out of the watering hole.
MOBILE DATA (which usually costs around $100 / GB in the Cooks and a LOT more when roaming overseas!)
When in the Cooks it always pays to head to Settings / Mobile Data and swipe down to check which apps haver permission to consume 3G data. You will likely find loads that don't need it so disable it for them, most importantly Photos, Google Photos, iMovie, ITunes Store, Music and any online File Storage provider you can find in there (DropBox, Mega, Google Drive, OneDrive etc). If you are reading this after the first or many shock billing statements you will see next to some items how much 3G data they have already chewed up.
Personal Hotspot is the worst possible idea to use the cooks as the devices that use it have no clue it costs $100 per Gigabyte - so if an iPad connected via your phone's personal Hotspot updates from iOS 9 to iOS 10 you can brace for $120 excess charge for that alone! Turn off mobile hotspot at all times - it will hurt, a lot, if you don't. The only place where you can turn this on is some place overseas where you get something like 40GB of monthly data for some $20 and where it just gets slower when you run into excess.
How to disable automatic app updates
starting with IOS 7 Apple also added another option to automatically update Apps. if you have a lot of Apps this too is going to cost hundreds - each month. Facebook for instance is updated at least twice a week and is 140 MB - so that's a Gigabyte for just Facebook updates every month. Add other large Apps and the numbers multiply.
You need to turn this off and update apps when you know it won't cost an arm and a leg (visiting NZ - end of the month when you know you have something left over - if ever?)
- Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
- Scroll down and tap on iTunes & App Store.
- Under the Automatic Downloads section, turn the option for Updates to Off.
- Also turn off Music, Apps, and Use Cellular data
That's it. App updates will no longer download and install on their own and will instead wait for you manually update them.
Now that you have taken care of the worst - it is time to enjoy that $1200 piece of Aluminium stuck in your back pocket and you only need to worry about theft now.
Likewise Google Photo and Photo backup is your enemy on Android devices and Mac and Windows PCs. Automatic updates (Windows/Mac/iDevice Apps/Google Store/Google Play Store) can also consume a lot of data so it is recommended to set this to 'ask' and to approve downloads only when you know for sure you can afford them.
Ka Kite
IT