What eats my bandwidth?

This month I have a 50% increase in my BB usage and can't really account for it. The only recent change is my signup to BT Wifi which makes my Home Hub available to passers-by, but I'm assured this does not affect my personal account which has a 10Gb limit. Normally my average is only 6Gb.

Can anyone say how much is downloaded by the excellent TBB speed tester? It's so alluring that I use it almost daily. It says it is downloading various tests but being non-techie I have no idea how much is downloaded.

The only other change is a few long video calls on Skype which I understand can be quite greedy.

Yup, Skype could be quite data intensive if both parties transmit HQ video.
Last week an one hour call used a total of ~1GB of data (upload+download)

In reply to a post by Malwaremike:

Can anyone say how much is downloaded by the excellent TBB speed tester?

I have a self-imposed 10GB total usage limit per calender month just for my monitoring purposes, which is rarely exceeded. This month I have done 22 TBB Flash speedtests and have just exceeded my limit in the last couple of days. I otherwise only do normal browsing, poker games and maybe 1hr TV streaming.

However on measuring 1 TBB speedtest it only used about 50MB.

Skype is where they have gone

Tbbmeter application will just sit and watch your usage unless you manually trigger any of its tests

BT Openzone / Wifi does not use any of your allowance.


On my connection the TBB Speedtester uses around 150MB down and 15MB up. So, once perday will mean in the order of 4.5 to 5 GB which would equate to half your monthly allowance. But if you connection is significantly slower then the volume will be less.

Open Task Manager and note down the total volumes transfer up and down then run a speed test and check the volumes after. Than will give a good estimate of the down & up volumes for a single test.

Edited by MHC (Mon 29-Apr-13 09:48:45)

The tbb web based speed test can be a small amount through to potentially over 1GigaByte on a very faster > 500 Mbps connection.

As usual, all my computer questions answered by return! Thanks very much, everyone.

Another aspect to avoid on SKYPE and similar, is if either one or both the Video Images are changing much.

That is, the content should be reasonably static.

One of my contacts rocks backwards and forwards continually, nearer to and further away from the SKYPE camera, producing a continually-changing image, resulting in his received image freezing and breaking up frequently.

The only light in the room is overhead in a position such that when he rocks back, the light is fully visible to his camera. As he rocks forward, his head blocks of that light but his features gradually darken until he is near enough his laptop screen for it to briefly improve the illumination!

A continually changing back-ground could have a similar effect.

For example, traffic showing up; or trees and bushes moving in the wind, or a working TV set in camera view across the room, or children running in and out of view.