Usage statistics.

My usage took a hammering over the Xmas break so I quite expected
to exceed my limit. No problem with that.

I did however check the usage first thing this morning on turning on the PC
and to my surprise it appeared that doing nothing more than connect and load
the Google homepage had taken 12 Mb. Router and firewall statistics showed no
further activity.

12Mb x 30 days just for connecting each month seems a bit excessive to
me. Anyone got a simple explanation?

Meldrew

In reply to:

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Anyone got a simple explanation?

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It's probably broken. I believe other customers are seeing problems with usage records.

Hmmm - I dunno - 12 - 25 Meg a day is about what I see when I don't actively use my connection. I do run an SSH server and a few other things, but even when it's quiet I think these sorts of quantities of background traffic are not too far fetched.

What do others see?

Ian

Looked at my usage for a day when just the router was turned on and it used 13.3MB.

Just as a comparison, a Newnet connection uses about 1.5MB/day with an idle router.

My PN connection uses about 1MB/day with the router turned on permanently.

Edited by paulby (Wed 02-Jan-08 23:58:53)

There seems quite a lot of inconsistency.
Have just checked my sister's PN account and her idle days are
all round about 200k using the PN supplied one port router.

Meldrew

Oh absolutely.

It'll vary considerably from person to person. I think Ian's asking more out of curiosity than anything else.

Strikes me as odd that an Idle connection should be using so much bandwidth. If you were using VOIP I could understand that but I would question what is being sent or received on a supposedly idle session.

It can be various things.

There'll always be background noise, like various IP scans and probes going on. In more extensive issues, it could be virus related.

I think background noise of 12 - 25 Meg a day would worry me.

Especially as a port scan only uses several bytes, not kilobytes. Maintaining a connection doesn't take that much either, the odd ARP query at 60 bytes and maybe a DHCP request now and then. Certainly not in the megabyte range

As for port scanning, I would have thought that an ISP representative would have the knowhow to turn off icmp responses.

Granted.

From memory, I normally see about 600-800KB on a daily basis.

If you are a regular P2P users then it is possible what is using all the bandwidth is repeated attempts to access P2P resources that are no longer available. I know from the past when I used P2P that the attempted connections continued days after I stopped.

For reference, when I last checked (I can't check now as Sky do not give me the necessary info) it was around 3-4Mb, when there had been no P2P activity for months.

Well, I know what most of the background traffic I see on my connection relates to and I've no particular problem with it being there. It's not coming from the PlusNet network in the main either.

I wonder if people find their PlusNet firewall settings makes much of a difference?

Ian