Working out our useage from the Brightbox router stats.

I'm reposting this here as I've had no reply yet in technical discussion.

42,698,775 Kilobits received and transmitted data figures combined from my Brightbox DSL status page. Our router has been connected for 2133 hours, so just under 89 days. I work that useage figure to be only 5.337 gigabytes! That can't be right what am I doing wrong? How do I work out our useage over the 89 days?
Thanks for any wise words to aid in my state of numptyness!

https://flic.kr/p/GpuS7b

Dave in the People's Republic of Cumbria

Why do you need to know? Are you on a limited usage product?

Personally I've never bothered looking at those router measures of data. Prefer to rely on a network metering program like Netmeter or tbbMeter on my PC.

Don't forget the router can only measure raw bits transmitted not the actual throughput of data Bytes getting to your PC.

I make it 40.72 gigabytes
Bear in mind the number is already in Kilobits so just do 42,698,775/1024/1024=40.72
Unless I've read it wrong as well

Why did you divide by 1024?

Because we are talking computers and it's just become a habit to use 1024 as it's used for most things apart from the hard drive.
It's a good point though, is data transmission usually KB or kB?
So strictly speaking it's 40.72 GiB or 42.7 GB
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte

More precisely, it is-

2 to the power 10 =1024

The nearest approach to 1,000 (Decimal), using Binary, the basic method of counting in computers.

2^0 = 1
2^1 = 2
2^3 = 4
...
2^8 = 256
2^9 = 512
2^10 = 1024

Sorry, that changed in 1999, the prefixes you describe are now Ki Mi and Gi. And you forgot to divide by 8 (bits in a byte).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#kibi

Forgetting that there are 8 bits in 1 Byte.

And even less that only about 5/6th of a transmitted packet contains user data.

However I do agree with you to divide by 1024 as that's how computers and downloads quantify them, but to be exact you should have first multiplied by 1000 to get bits before starting the divisions by 1024 .

Edited by XRaySpeX (Tue 26-Apr-16 05:03:28)

Thanks for all the replys guys.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Why do you need to know? Are you on a limited usage product?

I was just curious what our useage had been over the time connected. I'd been reading another thread on here and a guy said what he used a month and it got me thinking that's all. I'm on an unlimited plan with EE so I don't have any limit issues.
I'll have a look at those two programs you mentioned. I thought over 90 days our useage would have been a lot more than 41 GB so that is interesting to see. I didn't have a clue how to work it out I just shoved that Kilobit figure in Google and that is what came back obviously wrong

Dave