Teen Gets $2,000 Phone Bill, Blames Apple’s Wi-Fi Assist Feature

Wifi

According to a report by CBS News, a teen named Ashton Finegold from San Francisco was shocked when he received an outrageous phone bill totalling over $2,000, which he claims was due to “Wi-Fi Assist,” a new feature introduced by Apple in iOS 9. The feature automatically switches the phone to draw on cellular service when a user is in an area with a weak Wi-Fi signal. “It’s usually $250 a month — and this was over $2,000,” the teen’s father Jeff Finegold told CBS.

“I thought my dad was going to kill me,” Finegold told CBS News.

Apparently the teen’s bedroom is a place with a weak Wi-Fi signal. So while he thought he was still connected to his home Wi-Fi while surfing the web in his room, his iPhone was eating up more than 144,000 MB of data. Apple has chosen to make the Wi-Fi Assist feature enabled on all iOS 9 devices by default and needs to be manually turned off.

For those who don’t know, if you want to turn off the Wi-Fi Assist feature on your iPhone, go to Settings > Cellular and scroll down to the bottom to switch Wi-Fi Assist off.

Have you noticed your data usage increase with iOS 9?

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