Limit data usage per-device + bandwidth usage monitoring on OpenWRT

TukangUsapEmenq · November 27, 2021

In a nutshell, my home network primarily using 4G-based data with 117 GB per month of package. The network consists of a simple OpenWRT router (it's a ZTE B860 Android STB, heck, it works fine) with a Galaxy J1 Mini as the modem with USB tethering, then re-spread the whole thing with an old 150 Mbps TP-Link router. Ain't much, but no complaints so far, and we simply won't opt for fiber simply because of cost. Welp, there's another financial needs to meet, and if you wonder why not, I already asked and convince my parents lots of times to just get fiber but they still insists to just still go for the old way, even so I say it's the most efficient way tbh and, since it's so close to offline classes on next semester anyway, I hope, there's no benefit on us to have the extra cost and get caught of the contract (of minimum months of subscribing to the ISP) anyway.

Well, that 117 GB actually works on us, enough for the whole month, even sometimes I'm the one that have to download things to make sure the data is completely used for that exact month.... Few months back. Now, when I'm on my final semester (so, barely any online class) and brother's on the third semester, things went different. To put it simple, that 117 GB supposed to last for a month for us (even on my 'heaviest' usage), now it won't even reach 2 weeks. Welp, my brother have a lot of Zoom and Meet meetings nearly 8-12 hours/day (don't ask me what kind of meetings, I even don't know myself), near-constant, can't really blame him.

Now, the next, it might seems evil to you guys that I'm an asshole brother, but I figure it's the good one way to do so for the sake of 'balanced' usage.

One solution on my head that I need to limit usages by limiting per-device which how much quota they can get.

Example, there's 4 phones on the house and 2 PC, I want to limit their usage to just 500 MB/day for each device. I could use the MAC address or IP to do that, but I did a lot of research before and still can't get a straight and good answer how can I do it.

Another solution is to actually block both Meet and Zoom specifically on my brother's devices after he went past certain limit (as the per-device limit above), forcing him to use his own conference-only data plan (that unfortunately the cellular ISP's different that we use for that 117 GB plan) to continue his meetings.

What I meant to 'force him', I'm not trying to be evil, but we know as humans, we sometimes forget to turn off the wi-fi on the device we use on that ridiculously long meeting and just carry on to suck 6-8 GB of regular data per-day. I did so simply because he'd switch to his own cellular data for the conference-only data plan after that anyway, and everyone wins since it'd be a lot cheaper to us to use that conference-only data anyway.

So from what I said above... Any ideas or something that I can use on my OpenWRT router to limit it?

Thanks in advance.

danomicar · November 27, 2021

11 minutes ago, TukangUsapEmenq said:

In a nutshell, my home network primarily using 4G-based data with 117 GB per month of package. The network consists of a simple OpenWRT router (it's a ZTE B860 Android STB, heck, it works fine) with a Galaxy J1 Mini as the modem with USB tethering, then re-spread the whole thing with an old 150 Mbps TP-Link router. Ain't much, but no complaints so far, and we simply won't opt for fiber simply because of cost. Welp, there's another financial needs to meet, and if you wonder why not, I already asked and convince my parents lots of times to just get fiber but they still insists to just still go for the old way, even so I say it's the most efficient way tbh and, since it's so close to offline classes on next semester anyway, I hope, there's no benefit on us to have the extra cost and get caught of the contract (of minimum months of subscribing to the ISP) anyway.

Well, that 117 GB actually works on us, enough for the whole month, even sometimes I'm the one that have to download things to make sure the data is completely used for that exact month.... Few months back. Now, when I'm on my final semester (so, barely any online class) and brother's on the third semester, things went different. To put it simple, that 117 GB supposed to last for a month for us (even on my 'heaviest' usage), now it won't even reach 2 weeks. Welp, my brother have a lot of Zoom and Meet meetings nearly 8-12 hours/day (don't ask me what kind of meetings, I even don't know myself), near-constant, can't really blame him.

Now, the next, it might seems evil to you guys that I'm an asshole brother, but I figure it's the good one way to do so for the sake of 'balanced' usage.

One solution on my head that I need to limit usages by limiting per-device which how much quota they can get.

Example, there's 4 phones on the house and 2 PC, I want to limit their usage to just 500 MB/day for each device. I could use the MAC address or IP to do that, but I did a lot of research before and still can't get a straight and good answer how can I do it.

Another solution is to actually block both Meet and Zoom specifically on my brother's devices after he went past certain limit (as the per-device limit above), forcing him to use his own conference-only data plan (that unfortunately the cellular ISP's different that we use for that 117 GB plan) to continue his meetings.

What I meant to 'force him', I'm not trying to be evil, but we know as humans, we sometimes forget to turn off the wi-fi on the device we use on that ridiculously long meeting and just carry on to suck 6-8 GB of regular data per-day. I did so simply because he'd switch to his own cellular data for the conference-only data plan after that anyway, and everyone wins since it'd be a lot cheaper to us to use that conference-only data anyway.

So from what I said above... Any ideas or something that I can use on my OpenWRT router to limit it?

Thanks in advance.

Why don't you talk to your brother about getting his own dedicated connection for his studies? Limiting his bandwidth without his knowledge seems like a really complicated and unreasonable approach.

If his studies are taking all of your monthly bandwidth, it sounds like you have some good leverage for asking your family to upgrade to a dedicated connection.

Falcon1986 · November 27, 2021

45 minutes ago, danomicar said:

If his studies are taking all of your monthly bandwidth, it sounds like you have some good leverage for asking your family to upgrade to a dedicated connection.

Agreed.

Donut417 · November 27, 2021

1 hour ago, TukangUsapEmenq said:

500 MB/day for each device

Netflix uses up to 1Gig an hour for SD video. So 500 Megs aint Jack Shit. You need to have enough for Xoom and other things. So Im going to say you either need to have a talk with the family about DATA usage or buy a better plan.