As I'm approaching the limit of my paid-for usage, I have been keeping a keen eye on my figures and I'm a bit concerned about what I have been seeing. I try to take advantage of the free usage so anything which would pose a heavy load on my bandwidth is scheduled to be done between 00.15 and 07.45, well inside the 00.00 to 08.00 free usage window. This morning, I checked my usage for today, so far, as soon as I switched on my computer only to find that today I had already used 180Mb. How can this be? All my scheduled activity had stopped at 07.45, fifteen minutes before my paid for usage starts to be metered! Are the times which the free and paid for usage periods change based on current, i.e. GMT/BST(DST) times or is it fixed at UTC? This is the only cause I can think of for this anomaly.
OK, 11+ hours later, no response and I have just checked my usage again and today's paid-for usage (08.00 to 00.00) is now 818Mb - despite being out most of the day and my computer being shut down. Apart from a moderate amount of news browsing early this afternoon and watching a 3 minute YouTube video ( ), I can't account for the rest of today's usage. The Summary of Internet Activities page suggests that it was peer-to-peer but I do not have any peer-to-peer applications running at all - only as stated above, from 00.15 to 07.45. Had I not been so close to my limit (currently, I have 0.02Gb remaining until midnight tomorrow). I would not have been keeping such a close eye on it and I would not have been so careful about keeping my use down during the paid-for period. But it looks like I am about to be stung for £5.00 when I really cannot see how 818Mb has been used today.
These forums are Community based and monitored by Plusnet Digital Care staff only during normal working hours which excludes weekends and bank holidays. Do you have a wireless router? If so is it secured? Are any connections shown on it which are not yours?
Yes, my router is wireless. It has MAC access control enabled and only my equipment is on the access list. All devices which are enable are named and only my devices are connected. Besides, I live in the middle of nowhere and I only have one neighbour who is close enough to see my wireless network.
No. I kept my old router. I have been keeping an eye on my usage figures throughout the day and they have been creeping up despite me being at work all day - they have been rising by about 50Mb per hour all day. I'll have to investigate when I get home.
Hi there, Is it possible this is upstream traffic from something on your network? I could take a more detailed look tomorrow when I'm in the office but that's been the culprit on many similar investigations to this IME.
If you turn your router completely off (then unplug it from the phone line for good measure) does the usage increase? Could be that BT have connections crossed somewhere.
That's on my list of tests to do over the next day or two. Unfortunately, I'm working overnight tomorrow night and need the router on so I'm going to carry out another test tomorrow - I'll have to do the router off test later in the week.
Hi there, Is it possible this is upstream traffic from something on your network? I could take a more detailed look tomorrow when I'm in the office but that's been the culprit on many similar investigations to this IME.
There shouldn't be. I have a NAS which I use for wireless Time Machine backup (I'm on a Mac) which has a number of installed services but none which should be active outside the 00.15 to 07.45 window I explained earlier. I'm going to deactivate all but the one service tonight and see if that solves the problem. Then I'll deactivate that one. I'll then try switching off the NAS and finally switch off the router. By the end of the week I should have an answer - but at least I know that it was not my browsing which caused the weird figures - I couldn't see how just looking at a couple of news sites before I came to work could result the 180Mb use which I saw when I checked when I arrived at work.
Well, I'm glad to have found what is causing the problem but it isn't solved because without that add-on, the NAS can't function as intended. The problem is posted elsewhere in the hope that the add-on will be fixed by its author.
