Posted: 5/16/2014 7:34:11 AM EDT
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Here's the deal. For the 3rd month in a row I have gone over my data cap with my ISP. I use Cox Cable and have the 150Mbps down plan. That carries a 400Gb per month data cap. I recently cut off cable service and only use Netflix, Hulu or XBMC now. Network consists of 3 smart TV's, 3 latops, 1 desktops and 1 HTPC, 2 cell phones. At any given time only 1 TV is streaming and my wife and I may be on our laptops. The rest, other than cell phones, is either shut down or not being used. Cox's stated usage started to seem off to me so I turned on the Traffic meter on my router (Netgear R7000) and 1.5hrs the meter showed I used a little over 2Gb. In that time, My daughter was watching netflix and I was on my laptop (on arfcom) everything else was off. She was watching a cartoon, nothing HD. That seems to be a excessive amount of data for a SD stream and web browsing. What is a good program to use to specifically monitor the traffic on my network and see what device is using this amount of data? My router only tells me the amount of the inbound/outbound traffic. I want to see which device is using how much and when. Second question. I am probably going to switch over to their business class internet plan. Unfortunately the same speed package on business class is 300 a month and I'm not spending that much. They do have a 30Mbps plan that's running $100 right now, which is the same price I'm paying for the 150Mps plan. Would the 30Mps plan be enough bandwidth to support say 2 TV's streaming and web browsing on 1-2 pc's? |
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Netflix uses roughly 3 GB per hour of video in HD and 1 GB in SD. You can actually lower the video quality in your account settings to use less bandwidth if desired.
As far as monitoring usage there are free apps like NetWorx you can install on each PC to do it locally, but it's difficult for the smart TV's and other devices. You're pretty much limited to whatever capabilities your router offers for that. |
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Well looked into it further. One of two things going on. Virus/malware on one of the systems or someone was on my network. I had shut down netflix and was only on my laptop (mac pro) and I pulled another 3Gb in about 1.5 hours. Something was wrong. I was using wpa2(aes) with a decent passphrase but nothing is certian. Changed everything and went with a longer passphrase. I had a couple IPs that were showing connected that I couldn't account for right off hand, however I forget how many little gadgets we have in this house that are wifi. Like my daughter's nabi tablet, I had to run a search of the MAC to find a manufacturer to figure out what it was. I'll start running virus scans on each computer one by one and reconnect it to the network. I wish I could just get rid of wireless all together, but I just can't. |
| set up machine in the middle between your cable modem and whatever router is downstream. |
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Quoted: I don't know how tech-savvy you are, but you could use Wireshark to audit what data is sent. I've used Wireshark in the past for other reasons. I know I can inspect packets with it. I was just looking for something a little simpler. Basically, all I wanted to do is show traffic on each IP on my network. Say, 192.168.1.2 had 2Gb of data traffic today and 192.168.1.5 had 3Gb of traffic. I wanted to do that to narrow down which device was using data and when. Past couple of days I've switched over most devices in the house to wired, been running cat cable all over. |
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Quoted: Does your home router support Netflow by any chance? That's what I'd use in an enterprise; it tells the router to sends a summary of all traffic to a Netflow collector, which then shows you the type of stats you are looking for. Don't think it does. It's a netgear R7000. I looked through some specs on it and couldn't find anything. |
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Some routers have firmware that show data usage by IP, unless you want to buy a different router you're going to have to see what all is connecting to the internet via program of choice. I think Netstat -ag command will show connections but I'm a little rusty with the command prompt. Edit: You should also change your password and/or go into router firmware and only allow certain devices to connect and also stop broadcasting your SSID |