[Q] Little data roaming despite disabled

I have now for the second time the problem that I have many little data roaming connections while abroad, despite data roaming is deactivated in Android. They are so small (always exactly 30 kB, which seems to be the smallest quantity my provider is billing) that it's virtually impossible to produce them with normal traffic. I always have much larger data connections, even without using my phone (at least 100kB up to 1MB and even more if I use it, of course). In this case I had 9 of those connections while little more than 24h. Last time when I had this problem half a year ago, I had those connections for an entire week with the same frequency (~10 per day).

In both incidents there was an OTA update available for the Nexus 4. This time I received the update notification at some point during my stay abroad. I had wifi connection most of the time, so I assume the update was downloaded using the wifi connection (the roaming traffic is too small for the update by far). I did not install the update until I returned back home. Last time my phone wasn't able to download the OTA update, since I had a custom rom installed at that time. It is possible that it tried downloading the OTA update for the entire stay back then (and even before and after - I noticed increased traffic over normal mobile internet at home). I switched back to the stock rom a while ago and thus was now able again to receive official OTA updates.

This time I was staying for 8 days in Chile, last time was around one week of Italy. My provider is Orange Switzerland.

What can be the cause of this? I am absolutely certain that data roaming was disabled in Android both times. Could it be that Android somehow bypasses the disabled roaming when checking for OTA updates? But it would have to do it when already knowing there is an update, so what's the point of doing this? Or could it be a provider initiated connection to notify the phone of the update? What can I do to prevent this from happening in future?

Thanks for any input!
Martin

Thanks for the reply. I just disabled data roaming. I am abroad quite a lot, apart from these two incidents I never had any unexpected roaming charges. It must be somehow connected to the OTA update.

I will try disabling mobile data next time, maybe also disabling updates. But I also would like to understand how this can happen. Would it actually be possible that my provider initiates data connections to push the update notification? On the other hand my phone doesn't make those connections all the time, so it cannot just be the regular checking for updates. If it just received the notification via wifi, it would have downloaded the update via wifi immediately. So there must be some kind of mechanism I do not understand.

I also noticed that some of those roaming data connections occurred during the night, when I actually had wifi in the hotel for sure. This doesn't make any sense to me at all...

Disabling sync etc. is not an option, since I want to use it via wifi. Besides, this must be either a bug in the Android update mechanism (which is persistent over some versions apparently) or my provider is doing something stupid. In the first case I would like to inform the devs, in the second case I won't pay for the data roaming, since I wouldn't be responsible for it.

Any ideas how to find out which one is true? Is here by chance anyone who either
a) has received a bill with many very small data roaming connections despite roaming was disabled while an OTA update was rolled out, or
b) was on the contrary abroad while the OTA update was rolled out and received the update notification via wifi, and has not seen any such roaming connections on the bill?

Thank you very much!

korockinout13 said:

Which custom ROM are you running?

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I am on stock right now. During the first incident I ran some stock ROM, but I no longer remember which one. The data usage shows me Android OS would have transferred a 15.65 KB.

Edit: T-Mobile has no roaming charges if you are outside the US?

Interesting. So it is an Orange problem after all...

7ORO said:

Did you found a solution?

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Not really. I now disabled the OTA update service (using the disable service app), so this cannot happen any more (I believe). Also I will switch to another provider at the end of this month, so if Orange is doing something strange, I will no longer be affected.