Windows Phone 7's Data Usage Abnormally High?Windows Phone 7's Data Usage Abnormally High?

With unlimited data plans pretty much a thing of the past users need to be careful not to go over, especially if they have purchased a lower end plan. Windows Phone 7 may be making it impossible for some to keep data usage at a minimum.While there are plans today that allow for 200MB per month of data transfers, that is a pretty small amount unless you are just doing occasional emails or light web browsing. Most people today are connected to some cloud server that is periodically dialing the mother ship seeing if there is new data to pull down to the device.

Paul Thurrott has been tracking his data usage and noticed that after switching from an iPhone to Windows Phone 7, his usage has hit an all time high for 2010.

Now he has received an email from one of his readers that has data usage rates that seem well above what their normal usage would account for.

This phone is connected to their Outlook email server, Yahoo! email and Facebook. Location services are disabled, there is no streaming and since the device cannot multitask third party apps, any data usage must be from the OS or native apps itself. Email and Facebook updates just cannot account for that kind of data usage.

Paul is speculating it may be tied to the Marketplace, but it would have to be downloading the entire Marketplace catalog descriptions and associated screen shots to account for that, but even then, that doesn't explain the massive amounts of data uploaded.

Stay tuned to see if this is just a few isolated instances or if there is something else going on. What is truly unfortunate is the reader's carrier, AT&T, doesn't seem to be interested in doing anything but collecting overage fees.