Today Comcast wrote me and told me I was almost at my limit for the month. I was like, Wha? I usually get this from my cell phone provider. Comcast provides internet at my house. I didn’t even realize it had a cap.
I get 1024 GB a month. I’m within 99GB of that this month.
But I have no idea where this is going. I’m not even sure how to troubleshoot it. I looked at my router’s administration page and I see that I have a page called Traffic meter, but it wasn’t turned on until earlier tonight.
I asked the kids who are both home from college, but they don’t know. My wife doesn’t know. Maybe we were hacked? I blame the Russians and Donald Trump. But seriously, what could this be? How can I troubleshoot it? I guess I don’t have a scale for it, because I use the internet a lot for movies or whatever and I’ve never gotten a note like this before. According to the picture, we use about 10% of our limit every month. And I love watching internet porn. If this is porn files, that’s, like, a LOT of porn dude. What can it be? I know my daughter has been hooked on Game of Thrones on a friend’s HBO account, but that can’t be 1000 GB of traffic.
Look, we never want to admit what we’ve done to dear old dad.
See if you can track daily usage - that’s the hardest part. Might have to ask around or call your ISP for some tips. Change the wifi password without telling them and plead ignorance of what happened for a day or so, see what’s up. Put it back on without telling them for a day, then tell them the day after that. If you can track usage daily, you’ll see pretty quick where the point of failure is.
Yeah, it’s crazy. The records at comcast go back 6 months and it’s always between 50 - 100 GB, except for December when it was up to 150GB. So this, 900+ GB is madness.
I think one of their Macs might be compromised? Can you do that to a Mac? Maybe it’s my PC.
On the router I checked the stats and I don’t know what the heck it all means. It’s just a number. I switched it from unlimited to track both directions. If it’s outgoing and nobody here knows, then it’s probably a hack. Right? I don’t think anyone in the house is tech savvy enough to be doing anything intentionally, because… Like what would they be doing? Mining bitcoin? I mean, I just don’t get it. The comcast site says that you would have to watch video 21 hours a day for a month to use a terabyte of data. There are four of us here and we do a lot of screen time, but I don’t see anyone spending that much time on it.
It’s your kids. They have zero idea on how much anything is when they download things.
Running youtube / netflix for 4-6 hour will do that and I assure you they are doing for 8-12 hours.
Most routers have a daily traffic summary. Name all your IP addresses and you’ll soon find out who is using what.
The really bad thing is most routers I have seen do not have a daily limit you can impose so people are cut off when they reach it. That is what we really need.
Well, that doesn’t’ make sense. YouTube has been around for 10+ years and they’ve been addicted from the start. (8-12 hours/day is a modest estimate) This is a terabyte of data in less than 30 days.
Crap, it looks like a lot of upload traffic. Is it normal to have such a big disparity between upload and down? Is the 184 MB and the 6516 KB? Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to me. Why doesn’t the 6516 number have a decimal?
Is there an xbox or ps4 in the house? Everytime I have come close to hitting my data limit it turns out to be my son downlaoding a bunch of games like Black Ops 2 because he can’t decide what to play and some of those games are 70 or more GB each…
He did say he got 3 games today but it was like 10 apiece, so I didn’t think about it too hard. That’s probably it. I bet there is a way to check disk usage per game on the Xbox.
It’s probably worth looking into. Streaming alone (and I have 2 heavy video streaming users and 2 that are moderate heavy in the house) doesn’t usually cause too much of a problem for your average household, but it really can. For instance, I have netflix on pretty much all the time while I’m not at work, because I like having “TV on in the background” which these days is usually Netflix (currently I’m watching Catastrophe on Amazon, over the weekend it was Patriot) and in the last 30 days I used 131GB on Edge, which is the browser I stream everything on. Double that as my daughter also likes to have the TV on while she’s doing homework or just watching The Office again, and you are at 260GB. Factor in my son who is watching a lot of Netflix this last month because he discovered FRIENDS and has watched 9 seasons of that in the last few weeks, and you’re looking at close to 320+ GB just from streaming alone. Between downloading games (and they can be right massive on console, especially factoring in DLC downloads, and patches) and lots and lots of HD streaming, it can really add up quick.
EDIT Here is my top 5 for the last 30 days.
Origin is me pulling down Mass Effect Andromeda, Steam would be Endless Space 2 and Everspace. Chrome I have no earthly idea now that I think about it. I did pull down a Windows 10 ISO and all my documents, utilities, drivers, and etc. to follow my own advice from the other thread and refresh/rebuild my disaster recovery USB stick though, so that’s probably part of it. And Overwatch was free this weekend, which was 10GB on Blizzard. Over 200GB in the blink of an eye, and if you had asked me if I’d used more than normal data I’d be all “no way, man” which could be in the case of your kids - who keeps track of such things?
Having a data cap is the fucking worst. I had to keep an eye on it constantly for over 3 years even with a 1TB cap, it goes so fast in a 4-person house hold (despite what the ISP claims). I finally just bumped up my tier of service to 250Mb down and a 2TB cap. It’s extra per month but so worth not having to worry about data caps (too much).
Upload from you to the provider? That would only make sense along the lines of someone at your house streaming video outbound, or perhaps hacked and data being served from that host, or running bittorrent and they’ve become a seed for a file.
Somewhere on your router you should be able to see the wireless or wired MAC addresses connected. Process of elimination, turn things off, check stats, turn them on, check again in an hour, etc.
Good spot, I wasn’t paying attention to his screenshot at all.
Still worthy of a device by device troubleshooting method. On most of those router screens you can reset, and if not, you could reset the router and probably clear the data counter. I’d start with getting the kids off everything, reset, check counters, add them back, repeat.
Anyone using online backup services? Those can take up an enormous amount of bandwidth, especially on the initial synchronization.
Video streaming really could be the culprit, as more and more video content is 1080P or better. I have Netflix set to stream at lower quality, as HD streams add up pretty fast. If you have multiple people streaming video in full HD, that could totally add up like that.
