4gb a day internet usage??

Bones

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Switched to BT internet a couple of weeks ago. Within days I received a mail saying I was nearly up to my monthly usage limit. Received another today saying that I had blown the limit. I checked the online usage monitor and so far this month, 4 days, I have used 16gb (my monthly allowance 10gb). I raised a ticket with their helpdesk to query and someone called back, the usage is split 60/40 upload/download. I know for a fact as a family we rarely download stuff Sometimes watch a program on the iplayer but that’s about it.

Any ideas what it might be? Is it possible BT have got it wrong? Could the new HomeHub be faulty? I was with Virgin previously and I’m sure they would have let me know if the usage was that high
 
Unsecured?

Kids next door gaming and downloading films on your account :D

When Wi-fi first came in we also had people reporting susp people outside their houses sat in cars with laptops. Turned out to be eastern europeans quite often talking to folk back home for free.

ps: I know nothing about computers and GB usage etc.
 
With that amount of upload going on, you must be doing some file sharing of some sort.

As trippy says, have you secured your wi-fi? If so, accuse your kids. If still no joy, you'll have to just stop downloading all that hard core porn.
 
The hub is secure/password protected. I am convinced there is a fault somewhere. I will grill the eldest later to confirm (again) that she isn't file sharing, but she has been at work for the last few days and the daily breakdown of usage is a fairly steady 4gb a day. Yesterday was 2028mb download, 2644 mb upload.

On the plus side, it is faster than the Virgin service, but a a charge of £5 for every 5gb over the ten I will be paying £150 a month for the service :eek:
 
install DUmeter its free...... that will tell you whats happening.. providing you only have 1 computer in the house, or you will have to install it on each computer and see which is the culprit
 
The BT Homehub helpfully provides an open Wifi point for BT Openzone/Fon customers to use, unless you 'opt-out' on your BT configuration webpage. In theory the bandwidth for this is separate from yours, although it must have some impact on your line capacity.

If you have the opportunity to try another router (hub), see if it makes any difference.
 
The BT Homehub helpfully provides an open Wifi point for BT Openzone/Fon customers to use, unless you 'opt-out' on your BT configuration webpage. In theory the bandwidth for this is separate from yours, although it must have some impact on your line capacity.

If you have the opportunity to try another router (hub), see if it makes any difference.

You have to opt in to that.

:)
 
Did you consider?

You may have a bot on your computer which is using you computer to distribute emails, adverts etc.

Myke
 
Your home hub should have the stats on it if you go look at the logs. This will confirm if it is real or not. If it is real then firewall everything except the ports you have to use. 80 and 443 are the main surfing ports and if you don't use webmail then 25, 110 and 143 are the email ones. Other than that you don't need anything else open unless you are actually using bit torrent. Just to be sure I would also change your encryption key on the wifi and homehub access password and also switch off BT open zone. That little lot should stop it and you then need to go round the PC's and clean them of the malware that is on them unless of course someone puts their hands up.
 
Kids during school holidays get me far too close to my 60gb limit. Outside of holidays I get nowhere near it.

They were playing one or two fairly innocuous looking online games, the URLs for which I have blocked at the router.

I'm with Plusnet (part of BT) which allow me to monitor useage day by day so try kidnapping the offspring's gadgets for a day and see what happens. :D

Ironically, Xbox online games are very data efficient. A hardcore day's online gaming only uses about 250mb whereas a day on Roblox.com can use 2 to 3gb.;)

BTW, 10gb sounds a bit low......
 
I setup my mate with BT 10GB broadband, should have been plenty for her. Within days she had exceeded her limit, turned out the girlfriend of her son was downloading videos on file sharing sites. She now only uses about 1GB a month having banned the sons girlfriend from using the WiFi.

By the way iplayer will use quite a bit of data
 
By the way iplayer will use quite a bit of data

Indeed.

On the iPlayer, isn't there something about peer-to-peer connections where a load of PCs are transferring something in the background to make it easier to get data around the web?*






*Techno brain module not installed so utter bollocks is possible.
 
Many thanks for all the above helpfull advice. I will be following many of the suggestions and when i get to the bottom of what is going on I will post back.

:thumb
 
You have to opt in to that.

:)

Maybe for new connections now, but opted in was, and still is, the default setting on my HomeHub, if I opt out then I loose my free BT Openzone minutes.

But I only use the Homehub when I want to report a fault on the line, the helpdesk don't do Cisco or Draytek. Reasonably enough, they'd have to learn a lot of routers to support all of them.

The Akami programme, which is at best a check, and damn near fraud IMHO, can be disabled by using 'msconfig' to deselect it from starting at boot time.
 


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