My broadband usage - cannot believe it!

andygb

Just a quick update, following the advice of some very helpful people on here. I have had the wireless option disabled for the past couple of days, and yesterday, my usage - going by the BT stats - was way down to 0.21 GB, in other words what it was averaging a couple of months ago.
So once again thanks.

Lifeforms

Great!!
Monitor over a week, and see if it carries on improving. You might want to change the password etc, in the future, if you need to use wireless. If your usage keeps down, sounds like someone was using it with out your knowledge. For the future, if you turn it back on, use WEP2 security with a pretty hard to guess password.

Andrew1472

I think you mean WPA2.
The Home hub uses it by default.

Richard_T_

DCFC79 wrote: »

I believe its a wirless community setup by BT which uses home users wifi signal.

When you see BT openzone mntioned then thats teh BTFon

BT opted into to fon network by updating/installing fon software onto their routers ( home hubs) what this means to BT customers is that their home hubs ( routers) will output a fon wifi signal, and they will be opted into the fon network, this means that you can access any other fon wifi signal in the world for web browsing, and anyone else with a fon account can access your fon wifi signal.

As for usuage and security, if your with BT then the fon stuff is fully separate from your own usage, people who conect to your router using fon will not affect your usuage, or be logged via your account, neither can they access any of your files/folders etc.

If your not a BT customer and you want to join fon ou need to by a fon router, this is a small box that outputs a fon wifi signal, and allows other fon users to conect to it, as before the security stuff is separated, but any data traffic sent over it will be counted towards your isp usuage limit.

Lifeforms

Andrew1472 wrote: »

I think you mean WPA2.

Yes, my bad!

Naf

JMurph wrote: »

I am highly suspicious of BT now, because my usage habits haven't altered much

andygb wrote: »

My real concern, is that what BT are telling me is my usage, has really escalated over the past couple of weeks, despite me not changing my downloading habits.

Your average number of pages, or time spent browsing etc. may not had changed much, but what about the content of what you are looking up? The amount of data one website takes to load varies wildly from one to another - just increasing the resolution on images (or even just adding a few more) can easily double the size of a page. Then there's things where you feel like you're just on one site, but actually you're not really noticing the number of pages you click through because it's all in the same place and part of the same action.
Then consider the quality of what you're watching - even a small increase in this will make a proportionally huge difference to the data used. In addition, as the average Internet connection speed increases, website builders see the opportunity to put more and higher quality content into their sites: this also increases your data throughout, despite you only visiting the same site as before.
Many streaming sources now also monitor your Internet speed, increasing their quality as your internet's capacity to deal with it increases. This means that viewing the same stream during off-peak times, where the contention ratios are smaller, could use drastically more data than the same during peak hours.
So claiming that your habits have not changed makes no difference at all.

tombruton87

i think the answer is get a proper internet connection i can use ten gig in a miniute, I am on a 1 gig line tho

Lifeforms

Some people can live with a 10GB monthly limit, as is see often by people on here. BUT what I have noticed is a few threads mostly from BT 10GB users who say they suddenly have hit or are about to hit their limit unexpectedly. That is also after several months of being in their limits. So it does make you wonder about it. Usually after some investigation (one recently being grandson visited and was running a torrent program unaware) they can be solved, but some also have no solving too.

Chorlie

Is it just happening with BT customers?, my sister moved to BT and her usage seemed to jump up, but there are some reason for this (but over 10 fold does seem a lot even so).

So I'm wondering if people have switched to other Internet providers (other than BT) and seen there Internet usage increase higher then they expected, since it only seemed to be BT being mentioned on this thread....

andygb

My latest update (I know that this may seen boring to some, but I think it is important).

These figures are all since disabling wireless on the router/hub, and are the morning figures from "MyBT"

Saturday 9/6 - 5.66 GB
Sunday 10/6 - 5.87 GB
Monday 11/6 - 5.97 GB

I am still in excess of my average for the month, but judging by the last couple of days figures, may keep it below 10GB

My advice now to others, would be to disable the wireless connection if it is not essential.

I should add that the above figures are cumulative, and therefore yesterday's use was 0.1 GB