Data Usage Cycle - monthly vs. T-Mobile's 30-day prepaid plans

[AC Question]

This has been bugging me for a while and while I've looked around I've been surprised not to find anything on it. I have a Nexus 5 on a T-Mobile prepaid plan. I haven't looked at how T-Mobile advertises their plans, but in practice they bill them as 30-day cycles, NOT one-month (so I effectively lose out on 5 days per year). But the built-in Data Usage tracker only seems to let me set a cycle date assuming a 1-month cycle. This means that every time there's a 31-day month it gets misaligned by an additional day.

Sure, I can come in and manually change that cycle date when I want to track the usage, but it's really annoying to have to track whether or not it's currently off. Is there some "advanced" setting I can enable somewhere secret to get the behavior I want?

Contrary to other reports, I've found the data usage tracking in the phone to match the carrier's pretty well (provided I have the cycle properly aligned). I just wish the alignment would stick.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central, and sorry for the delayed response! You're actually not specifying the number of days in the cycle--you're specifying which day of the month a new cycle begins. If you go to Settings>Data Usage, and then tap the dropdown next to "Data Usage Cycle," you'll see "Change Cycle" at the bottom of the dropdown. (Make sure mobile data is on, or you won't see it.) Then you can specify a different date for when your service resets the monthly cycle. This will still account for months when there are 31 days or 28, because you're setting the date, not the duration.

EDIT: Sorry, upon rereading your post, I realized that you specified prepaid, while I have Simple Choice. So you're saying that prepaid actually bills on a straight 30 day cycle, rather than on a particular date of the month? That's pretty odd.

 

[RumoredNow]

You might try a T-Mobile My Account App for more accuracy.

https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...com.tmobile.pr.mytmobile&hl=en&token=gYR0LiEV

 

[Andrea_P]

I have exactly the same issue and found this thread as a result of a search. My EE payg is based on a 30 day rolling period. Annoying that this option isn't available in the settings within lollipop. I disagree that it's odd. There must be a lot of users with this issue. I use 'my data manager' to track usage which works well and has a 30 day option.