Usage stats / traffic profiling errors

[#1]

I've been watching my traffic usage quite closely since signing up with Plusnet, and I've noticed a problem.
According to Plusnet I have used 2.04GB of VoIP traffic in the last 4 days.
I did some maths and found that that would mean I had been making 2.63 simultaneous VoIP calls 24x7 for those 4 days, or allowing me to have 8 hours sleep and therefor not on the phone means Ive made 3.94 simultaneous VoIP calls 16x7.
Now I'm a heavy user of VoIP, but even I can't talk simultaneously on 4 phones all day long.
In reality in the last 4 days I've only been using the phone for about 6 or 7 hours each day, by my estimates that around 200Mbytes of data, far far short of the 2.04Gbytes shown in my usage stats.
Now, I think I know the source of this discrepancy, my VoIP stats jumped up massively yesterday, where as my download/ftp stats stayed stubbornly at near zero.  This was unexpected, as I upgraded one of my machines from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 10.10 Beta which meant the downloading a at least a few hundred Mbytes.  However even that doesn't explain the full story, the discrepancy is still too large.
But one thing I would hate to think, is that for some reason in these amber days of traffic control unattended downloads from Canonicals download servers are treated with the same priority that VoIP is.
Perhaps this is the source, or part of the source for why Plusnets network is currently unbalance and out of shape?

[#2]

OK, I got what I think is proof of this now.
I used the Ubuntu update manager to download some 40mb plus, it came at a very good speed.  And my VoIP usage jumped afterwards.
About an hour later I started to download some software directly from Canonicals (Ubuntu) FTP servers and guess what, slow as a dog as expected, took it 10 minutes to download 20mb before I suspended it, will restart it after midnight.
BUT - Ubuntu updates are being classed as VoIP which is very strange.

[#3]

Whilst they could be being classified as VOIP usage, when using the update manager you could also be downloading them over http.
I think the update manager is just a wrapper for the apt subsystem so if you sudo cat /etc/apt/sources.list you'll be able to see if you're using http or ftp.

[#4]

lol, well thats good for Ubuntu  a huge amount of software is available by apt-get, synaptic and the software centre (which all use apt) so I guess Ubuntu users (and I guess Debian users too) get fast downloads whilst Windows users get to wait...  not that I'm objecting... but it does amuse me.
However, I am convinced that a chunk of my usage is getting erroneously allocated to VoIP, apparently 19% of 13.66GB in around 5 days now has been on VoIP, but my calculation says my  VoIP only uses 23kbps of bandwidth (G.723.1 at 6.4kbps, 20ms packet duration, 1 call) which even if I was on the phone for 16 hours per day would only amount to 166Mbytes per day, so 5 days worth would be 828Mbytes, yet 19% of 13.66GB is 2.6GB, that's one huge discrepancy.

[#5]

And yep, my apt.source are all http://
I would suggest Plusnet that all the below need to be added to your list of download servers:
dl.google.com
extras.ubuntu.com
security.ubuntu.com
archive.canonical.com
*.archive.canonical.com
archive.ubuntu.com
*.archive.ubuntu.com

[#6]

Thanks fourfourdevon,
I'll get someone to look at that in the morning.
Jojo