SamKnows White Box - Largest Downloader On My LAN!!!

I recently migrated to Virgin Media from BT Fibre (80/20 ), I am now on 200/10 (it's actually 220/12 as i am the only person in the cabinet apparently as they have just arrived in our area.

I have also installed pfSense as my router since changing ISP and one of the benefits of this device is that it shows great stats.

However, I am quite shocked by the volume of data that my Samknows White Box is downloading - It is far and away the highest downloader on my network!

Over the previous 1 day, 15 hrs, 19 mins, 18 secs it has downloaded 21,694,904,832 bytes - Over 21GB in under 40 hours. The White Box is consistently the highest downloader every time I check the stats.

Is this to be expected? Is this specific to VM? If so why?

I've had my white box for a number of years, can I stop taking part and keep it/flash the fw?

How is it helping you/why would you want to keep it ?

If it�s giving you grief, just hand it back.

My WhiteBox doesn't download much, it does do its little speed tests now and then, but apart from that I hardly notice it.

If you no longer want to use it, I would contact SamKnows and tell them that you no longer want to have it running.

They might say send it back, but I hardly doubt it.

Paul

I've had my white box for a number of years, can I stop taking part and keep it/flash the fw?

You can stop taking part and send it back anytime you want.
Why would you want to keep it if you don't wish to participate in their tests anymore?

Has been for years. That's why I got rid of my SK box several years ago. It was chewing through my 10GB allowance so fast there was hardly anything left for me. Good riddance to usage allowances and good riddance to the SK box as well.

not really a surprise if its doing it once every 30 minutes (say around 300mb per test) your internet is 220mb so its going to show a lot of data used compared to FTTC (looks like 15GB per day ish so i would guess 300mb per test)

unsure how the whitebox is configured (you should have a login page that you can use to see what it is doing) https://samknows.one/profile

Edited by leexgx (Fri 08-Jun-18 06:18:58)

That is a bit excessive. Since the beginning of the year the most tests it's run in 24 hours is 12, most days it's between 4 and 8 test per day.

I assume the OP has got the box connected correctly between his router and internal network because it should only be running tests at times of low or no network activity. It's always possible SK have updated the firmware so the tests are run when network activity is below a certain percentage of the maximum speed of the connection. That would mean tests are run more frequently on faster connections.

Every hour mine does:
Multi-thread download test
Multi-thread upload test
Latency test
Website load time test

Every two hours:
Netflix tests
Youtube tests

Others:
576 times per day - DNS response time test

I have grouped them as I believe the stats that fall into groups (such as the 4 netflix stats) would come from a single test.

It is doing a lot more than just one download test an hour - not sure how much bandwidth is used for the video tests but it is confirming that Netflix is UHD capable so enough to check that. I haven't monitored data usage and my connection is only 45Mb but that is a fair number of tests to do a day - some will be less bandwidth intensive than others.

You can see in my BQM the spikes every 3 hours, that is my SamKnows Box.
But I do also see some every hour now and then.

Paul

What pfsense plugin/menu option/extension have you used to get the per-device usage stats?