There are probably 3 main groups of people with WiFi appliances:

1. The vast majority of people don’t care, and put it on their normal WiFi router and would never notice something like this
2. A smaller group of people don’t care much, but pay attention to their bandwidth usage and would spot an appliance trying to send 3.7 GB of data a day
3. A much smaller group of people are paranoid and would put the device on its own isolated subnet, or use firewall-type features to limit the access their appliances have to the Internet.

My guess is that if this were a widespread problem, people in the second group would notice, or would have immediately checked and chimed in and said “holy crap, mine is doing this too”. I didn’t hear many people saying that, so I’m guessing this is a bug, and it’s either a one-off weirdness, or it’s a bug related to people in group 3 who are blocking their appliances from being able to connect to the Internet.

It’s probably something as simple as a badly programmed firmware update check that doesn’t do exponential backoff when it fails. It probably connects, fails, then immediately tries again. A proper exponential backoff would wait before trying again, and if it failed again it would double the wait time down to some minimum value like once per day or something.