High data usage but nothing connected

[#1]

Hi Folks,
Firstly, To Plusnet, thank you for allowing those on old capped packages to go slightly over without incurring financial penalty.
Nevertheless I am am trying to stick to the good habit of limiting my usage but finding that usage is creeping up at an alarmingly high rate of at least 10MB/hour with NOTHING connected, at that rate, 72 percent of my allowance would be used up this month with nothing connected to my router by wifi or ethernet. I refuse to be greedy in case it impacts on others, but something is making me look that way.
I do have a silly old website with plusnet and I am wondering if it might be getting extra webcrawler hits that are causing this. I checked its webstats page and there is nothing yet recorded for today, but yesterday does have ten times more hits than the last 20 days or so.
I dont want to unplug the old router from the wall or turn off the power because last time that was done its performance (wifi range) was sub-optimal for a long while after doing so, also any helpful logs would be cleared.
If this fake personal 'usage' is down to visits (KB F), given that one cannot control visits to ones website is it not a bit silly to let growing numbers of creepy webcrawlers steal 70% of my metered bandwidth before I even get to use it. If so the website is going to be hidden by replacing index.htm with a near empty one, and renaming the old index.htm as a backup.
All my daytime web access is via 4G using a completely different provider.
Where is this apparent plusnet usage coming from?

[#2]

@Robz  Welcome to the forum 

No one on a capped package could sensibly be considered greedy unless they’re a millionaire! I can get through 100GB per month. I believe some can use terabytes.

Do you have any powerline devices transmitting Ethernet over the mains? Unless the password is changed it’s not unknown for neighbours to buy units with the same default password and accidentally connect to the wrong network.

[#3]

Hi Baldrick, thanks for your kind reply. No I dont have any powerline devices. I live in a flat, so my neighbours might but it is unlikely. As is a password match. I know the old technicolour router does send a fend few kilobytes of data a day for operational reasons, but ten megabytes an hour is much more. This issue has caused a warning email from PN that I am nearing my limit. I would rather not test PN will honour their kind promise to not charge if i go over limit because I know from past experience that by default their keen billing dept is unlikely to keep up with this emergency rule and carry on as usual thus requiring a jihad of effort to get the the money back if I live long enough 🙂
Does anyone know if a visitor dowloading 10MB from by web[-Censored-]e will cause 10MB to be added to my usage allowance?

[#4]

Update

I finally had to switch off the router during yhe day from 0800-2359.
The usage still continued to rize another 40MB over 3 hours then finally stopped.

Conclusion1. Usage of allowance might not be due to visits to my website. So probably no need to delete/hide my website content just yet. I was probably thinking of the cap on daily usage of website by sum of all visitors.

Conclusion2. Using the TG52n routers network access control (WIFI time control) to prevent all access to all devices from start of 0800 to end of 2300 hours does not stop the router itself using up bandwidth at 10MB/hour and might even cause the problem.

Any polite comments, anyone?

[#5]

Hi @Robz

Having checked the account, there isn't anything obvious that would be causing this. Also, the usage is not logged in 'real time', so the data may have just caught up with itself when the router was turned off.

As you are aware, we are suspending all additional broadband usage charges during the pandemic.

Please do let us know if you have any further questions.

[#6]

Hi Team/KatieC
Thank you for taking the time to check my account and get back to me especially when you must be stretched already.

There have been a few developments.

The router might have been catching up as you say, but in the past it has not done so late, so much, and so steadily during the protracted period of non use. Turning off the router stopped the usage growing immediately too but that is not a good habit, so I tried the following.

The olde antique Plusnet TG52n router has a number features accessible from its settings interface at 192.168.1.254 and they work, but not necessarily together (as Eric Morcambe might have said).

1. The internet connection can be disconnected while leaving it all physically plugged in to the phone with ADSL connected, so this feature might not cause the possible performance reduction that happens by phyically disconnecting the router from the phone socket. It turns out this disconnect-internet facilty is especially useful with Windows 10 if like me you interconnect your computers etc via wifi. Why? Because when you network computers via wifi with Windows 10 it does so VIA THE ROUTER using it as a network hub. If you switch off the router you would loose your local networking too. Direct connections between Computers, also called ad hoc networking are only possible via a sequence of commands at a command or powershell prompt. It is not clear how to reverse those commands if things get messed up so I feel that is best avoided. There are probably also good reasons why the latest Windows 10 (and Android) GUIs (graphical user interfaces) do not support ad hoc networking. Ad hoc networking is only inteded for temporary connection anyway.

2. Home networking-> Access Control. This router feature lets you set times of day when the router allows known computers to connect to it via wifi in order to have internet access. Whilst this works well there are 3 things to be beware.
a) it REGULARLY sychronises the routers clock to to a time server on the intenet. The regularity might explain extra data usage by the router with this feature activated. The actual interval is unknowm and not configurable. Wikipedia reports that a number of devices have historically swamped time servers by synchronising too often without dropping back the rate it retries and without checking other time servers. This is down to unsophisticed firmware in the router and such behaviour constitutes network abuse causing denial of service in extreme cases.
b) because of the above need to sync with an internet time server it is best to keep the internet connect/disconnect feature in the connected setting if using the routers access control feature.
c) the windows10 network status icon in the notification area of the taskbar does not always update in accordance with the actual state when the routers access control feature denies or grants access to a computer in real time at the configured times. Also sometimes Windows will post a notification asking you click a connect button just to be sure you are OK with that.

So to cut this long story short. Using a combination of the above I have been able to refuce or eliminate to hidden data usage.

Thanks again.
Robz