Windows 7: Bandwidth Monitering On SMC 8014WG Router

Hey,

I live with 5 other roommates sharing an internet connection using one router; an SMC 8014WG. Recently, our bandwidth usage has shot up exponentially and was wondering what could be the cause.



We have a 95GB limit, and all of a sudden started going over by around 50GB per month. We do download torrents, however, no where near enough to get to to that point (maybe 10 movies a month between all 5 of us)

We recently got XBOX Live but from my research I find it unrealistic to cause our problems.

Thus, i was looking for any sort of program that would allow me to moniter the bandwidth usage on our router.... any suggestions would be great!

Thanks

Hello Hockeyman,

You have the following options as far as i can see.

1) Provided your router supports it, you can use open source firmware like DD-WRT or Tomato to monitor bandwith usage at the router level. You'll need to check whether whether your router is compatible before doing that. See this thread.

Monitor Your Monthly Bandwidth with Your Router - Networking - Lifehacker

2) You can use freeware apps like Netlimiter (just google) to monitor traffic on individual PCs but to do that for your entire "household", you'll need to install the software on each of the PCs and then add up everybody's score to get total usage at the end of the month.

3) You should be able to login into your ISP's website and check your download details from time to time. This will give the total usage of the common connection.

I would use either DD-WRT if it's compatible with your router or go for the netlimiter software if not.

Your X-BOX live shouldn't be using more than about 10-25MB per hour *if you're not hosting*. If you're hosting then it's another story.

If you use Xbox live for 10 hours a week and never host you'll end up using 1GB per month. So just don't host games and you can play Xbox Live indefinitely and not worry. Your bandwidth is likely taken up by downloads that your roomates aren't telling you about.

The one problem with the DD-WRT solution is that it won't tell you which IP address is using the bandwidth. If you want that you'll have to go with the netlimiter solution.

Depending on the format, the movies you're downloading are likely betwen 700MB and 1.5GB. That makes it 15GB a month @ 10 movies. The one thing you can't account for is traffic. You should know that even if you just watch a movie over HULU, you're still downloading the movie. Therefore you might as well download it and save it that way you don't need to download it again.

Have you scanned for malware? Since filesharing from P2P sites is just about the best way to pick up the latest and nastiest infections, I would start with a thorough malware scan of all connected computers.