What Bandwidth/Speed Am I Actually Using

AlnMonro

Hi all,

I wonder.....I know there is lots of ways to find out what Broadband speed I'm actually getting from my provider VM 350MB but what I would like to tell is what I'm actually using.....what I'm trying to establish is there any reason to pay for a top speed of Broadband when I'm only actually using say half that

Hope that makes sense

Thanks

[Deleted User]

Yes - do a speed test.

AlnMonro

Deleted_User said:

Yes - do a speed test.

HI, If you mean something like speedtest.net for example, isn't that only telling me the line speed rather than what I am using when say 3 or 4 devices are connected and streaming TV or gaming?

bill888

You probably need to substitute the Virgin Hub with a router which can show usage data.
Off the top of my head, routers running open source Tomato firmware such as Shibby Tomato and perhaps the newer Fresh Tomato offer usage graphs

Shibby Tomato.  24 hour window:


Routers running OpenWrt can provide 'crude' real time usage in a window of a few minutes.

Only issue is if you have VM 350mb service, I don't know if there is any 'affordable' gigabit router which is capable of supporting that broadband speed running Tomato or OpenWrt.  Perhaps Netgear R7000 for Tomato, and Linksys EA6350v3 for OpenWrt but don't quote me.  WARNING: Installing 3rd party software onto router will invalidate the warranty and is not for the feint hearted because installation can go wrong and brick the router.

There may be off the shelf routers which provide statistics out of the box, but they won't be cheap.
Someone else may be able to offer other suggestions.

If the most demand application is streaming HD video, unlikely you'd need more than 100/10mb or even 50/5mb service. 

If you 'upload' files to say cloud storage, then the 'upload' speed makes a difference.   The upload speed on VM 350mb service is 35 Mbps.

brewerdave

AlnMonro said:

Hi all,

I wonder.....I know there is lots of ways to find out what Broadband speed I'm actually getting from my provider VM 350MB but what I would like to tell is what I'm actually using.....what I'm trying to establish is there any reason to pay for a top speed of Broadband when I'm only actually using say half that

Hope that makes sense

Thanks

Unless you have multiple devices streaming UHD video simultaneously, you will be using a tiny fraction of your available bandwidth @ 350Mb !
As an example, I can run two HD streams together on my standard ADSL2 line without buffering, which speedtest shows is capable of ~ 16Mb !