Working out our useage from the Brightbox router stats.

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

Edited by deleted (Sun 24-Apr-16 18:02:54)

The counters in routers are well known to not have enough bits for their intended purpose, so they cycle back to zero often. Presenting the number on-screen often gets the decision over signed/unsigned wrong too, so cycling might go via a whole spectrum of negative numbers too.

The best answer is to monitor the counter over the course of an hour, or a day, or a week, to see behaviour at smaller time scales.

Cheers WWWombat
Where I posted this on the EE page XRaySpeX has given me a couple of programs to look at where you can monitor usesage. I was just really curious to see what our useage was over 90 day. Someone came back with the figure of just under 41 GB. I thought it would have been more than that over 3 months so it just goes to show you. I just shoved that kilobit figure in Google and wrote what came up, which was obviously wrong. Bits, bytes...I'm not that good on all that stuff

In reply to a post by GorillaWheels:

Someone came back with the figure of just under 41 GB.

Forget that figure. As I pointed out in that thread, that guy forgot there were 8 bits in a Byte. Notice 41/8 Gb = 5.125 GB = about your calculation.

Google has only given you the amount in GB of the transmission data. This is not the same as the amount of digital storage data seen by your PCs for 2 reasons:

1. For transmission data 1 K = 1000, but conventionally for digital storage on PCs 1 K = 1024, altho' strictly speaking the use of 'K' is not the international standard for this unit but it should be 'Ki'.
2. Not all transmitted data reaches your PCs (throughput) cuz of the protocol & routing overheads carried by it. My rule of thumb on ADSL is that actual throughput is 5/6th of transmitted data

So, to be exact:
42,698,775 Kilobits = 42,698,775,000 bits = 5,337,346,875 Bytes of transmission data (as per Google)
= 5,337,346,875 * 5 / 6 Bytes = 4,447,789,063 Bytes of digital storage data (the throughput)
= 4,447,789,063 / (1024*1024*1024) = 4.142 GigaBytes of digital storage data.

However as pointed out the counters kept by the router are limited in their capacity & therefore cannot be trusted. You'd be better off getting a network metering program on your PCs for your purpose.