Oddly high data usage...

[Helepolis]

My parents recently go a VERY large bill for excessive data usage and have asked me to look into it for them. They were told in the last 12 days they've used 800gigs. With an internet connection that caps out at around 1.5MB/s, 800gigs in 12 days is quiet impressive and has me a little suspicious. I combed through their computer for any obvious malware and found nothing. Their primary usage is Facebook with their tablets, Netflix before bed, and basic E-mail. My Brother who still lives there just plays wow and watches a lot of twitch. While video streaming seems like it would be the easy suspect... given the stats above it still shouldn't be THAT much. Their password is just a random combination of letters and numbers so I don't suspect a security compromise.

 

Now, we tried calling Telus to see if we could get some answers and they couldn't bring up anything for us. However They asked us our primary uses and said "Oh well WoW uses 12gigs an hour for the average user". There is so many things wrong with that claim, we will not be speaking to them again. 

 

Is there a program I can use to monitor the traffic going through their network? Currently their network consists of a Lynksys EA4500 router with a Lynksys 4200 set as a secondary access point, 4 computers with gigabit wired connectsions, 3 tablets (1 ipad, 1 nexus 7, 1 Kindle), and 4 smart phones (all iphones), and a PS3(netflix box) in the house.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Hans Christian | Teri]

There is absolutely no way in hell World of Warcraft uses 12 gigs of traffic an hour. That is complete bullshit.

[Pomfinator]

Your neighbor could be torrenting pron, a lot of it.  

[techguru]

Their primary usage is Facebook with their tablets, Netflix before bed, and basic E-mail. My Brother who still lives there just plays wow and watches a lot of twitch

 

probably this

if they are watching the 1080p stream on netflix

and if your brother is watching alot of twitch..I can see it reaching that...does still seem a little high tho

[techguru]

.

[KTFO|SGTmoody]

My parents recently go a VERY large bill for excessive data usage and have asked me to look into it for them. They were told in the last 12 days they've used 800gigs. With an internet connection that caps out at around 1.5MB/s, 800gigs in 12 days is quiet impressive and has me a little suspicious. I combed through their computer for any obvious malware and found nothing. Their primary usage is Facebook with their tablets, Netflix before bed, and basic E-mail. My Brother who still lives there just plays wow and watches a lot of twitch. While video streaming seems like it would be the easy suspect... given the stats above it still shouldn't be THAT much. Their password is just a random combination of letters and numbers so I don't suspect a security compromise.

 

Now, we tried calling Telus to see if we could get some answers and they couldn't bring up anything for us. However They asked us our primary uses and said "Oh well WoW uses 12gigs an hour for the average user". There is so many things wrong with that claim, we will not be speaking to them again. 

 

Is there a program I can use to monitor the traffic going through their network? Currently their network consists of a Lynksys EA4500 router with a Lynksys 4200 set as a secondary access point, 4 computers with gigabit wired connectsions, 3 tablets (1 ipad, 1 nexus 7, 1 Kindle), and 4 smart phones (all iphones), and a PS3(netflix box) in the house.

 

Thanks in advance!

Odd

 

In terms on monitoring.  Both devies that you listed dont support monitoring unfortuanly.  But what you can do is if you have a smart or managed switch that supports SNMP or port mirroring you can put this between the modem and the EA4500. if its suports SNMP you can have a seperate computer attatched to the swtich that will just manage the switch and can be used to monitor it with something like cacti : http://www.cacti.net/   that way you can then graph the ports data usage over time (also in real time with the plugin)   other wise the only other thing you can do is enable SNMP on all the computers and again use cacti to graph it, but this might not show your overall usage.

[dzonidev]

Well actually if you max out your 1.5MB/s connection you are able to download 129.6GB/Day or 1555.2GB in 12 Days.

 

800GB/12D = 66.6GB/D
66.6GB/24H = 2.77GB/H
2.77GB*1000 = 2.777MB
2.777MB/3600 = 0.7716MB/s

0.7716MB*8 = 6.172Mb/s

 

A "Source" quality Twitch stream can use up to 1GB/Hour. Netfilx requires you to have at least 4Mbps to stream, and a 4Mbps connection uses around 1.8GB/Hour. Windows Updates, Tablet/Phone updates, if you have anthing else in the house it could be the cause. Keep that in mind. But as KTFO suggested, you might want to setup some kind of BW monitoring on the network.

 

If you still think the numbers are BS, appeal the bill and ask for a comission to examine the bill. Almost every ISP has those kind of services.

[techguru]

you kinda need a new router that can monitor your bandwidth..

I would use the asus ac56u with the asus merlin firmware