Unexplained usage - 1.0GB spike

[#1]

I was watching my usage very closely last month. Everything was fine until a few days before the end of the billing period when the peak total jumped from 3.1 to 4.1 GB in one day. I know what I was doing on Wednesday June 4th - and it wasn't me!
Of course the ellacoya kicked in and added insult to injury by completely failing to release, as outlined in other threads. That fault has been acknowledged and manually fixed as part of the ticket I've raised, but I'm not getting very far appealing against the suspiciously round number of 1.0GB unexplained usage.
Could the problems be connected, and has anyone else noticed anything like this? 

[#2]

Well, I have just read this post in another thread, which I guess could be related... no idea if it really is though.

[#3]

Quote from: swapmeetpete

I was watching my usage very closely last month. Everything was fine until a few days before the end of the billing period when the peak total jumped from 3.1 to 4.1 GB in one day. I know what I was doing on Wednesday June 4th - and it wasn't me!

This is an hourly break down of your usage on that day, taken directly from our RADIUS platform:

Hour	Upload (MB)	Downloaded (MB)
1	0.11	0.30
2	0.36	0.99
3	0.27	0.70
4	0.01	0.00
5	0.46	1.90
6	1.50	6.45
7	1.06	4.56
9	0.01	0.00
10	2.61	24.16
11	6.16	57.32
12	6.66	92.32
13	7.34	140.36
14	8.18	138.98
15	9.31	137.07
16	9.14	146.55
17	8.90	159.57
18	10.08	140.60
19	11.71	114.51
20	8.86	98.60
21	4.94	76.71
22	2.86	44.41

The only maintenance work I'm aware of around that time was this.

[#4]

Thanks, not sure I'm interpreting the figures correctly, do they show 1.0GB usage during the 4.00pm-midnight peak period?

[#5]

looks like 780m up to 10 pm

[#6]

That's up to 11pm pierre. Not sure what I did with the data for the last hour of the day?

[#7]

So are there any conclusions to be drawn? The offical line is that the data must have been used at my end. I know I'm only using WEP but I know my locality; I don't believe my wireless was hacked and I'm certain I don't have any spyware.
Thanks for your input guys.

[#8]

have you used the BBC Iplayer or 4OD, on that day?, if you are not careful in switching them off completely, you PC can act as a server and pass the programs onto other people.  also look at your usage on the member centre, its not accurate, but might give you a clue what type of usage took you 1G
https://portal.plus.net/view_my_broadband_usage/index.php
Click the view internet activities to get to the details screen

[#9]

Quote from: pierre_pierre

have you used the BBC Iplayer or 4OD, on that day?, if you are not careful in switching them off completely, you PC can act as a server and pass the programs onto other people.  also look at your usage on the member centre, its not accurate, but might give you a clue what type of usage took you 1G

Yup, I had checked the usage details, virtually nothing on streaming, FTP or P2P, web was the only throughput large enough to register 1.0GB. Your BBC Iplayer theory is interesting but wouldn't that register as streaming as opposed to general surfing? And if the PC was accidentally acting as a server, wouldn't the high figures be on the upload side?
Another thing, all last month's figures disappeared at the new billing period. Didn't we used to have access to figures going back two or three months?

[#10]

Quote from: swapmeetpete

Yup, I had checked the usage details, virtually nothing on streaming, FTP or P2P, web was the only throughput large enough to register 1.0GB.

Could it have been automatic software updates I wonder? The upload figures are negligible so we're definitely talking about download.

[#11]

Have you recently updated / installed AVG? May explain some of the extra traffic: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/13/avg_scanner_skews_web_traffic_numbers/

[#12]

Just been into AVG V8 control panel, and have turned off the active scanner mentioned, fairly easy to do if you remember what the unit is called

[#13]

AVG has been causing more problems than it solves for a while now. Time to ditch it?
Useful info but I don't think we can hold AVG responsible for downloading a gig in eight hours. Ditto Microsoft Update which was not particularly active on June 4th, or 'gigabyte Wednesday' as I'm starting to think of it.

[#14]

I also doubted that I is responsible for the data transfer, but though that it may account for SOME of it. Probably worth turning it off anyway.

[#15]

I've updated a MSWindows box on Wed morning and IIRC it was a few hundred megabytes.  To avoid nasty surprises I have set up automatic updates to notify me, but not download anything until I do so manually.  Ditto for Adobe Acrobat and a few more applications.