Bandwidth Cap?

[cbolt67]

I have Time Warner Cable. I live in a Dallas Texas suburb. They haven't implemented caps here yet, but I'm sure they will. Now I'm trying to make sure I understand the cap. If it's 40GB that's 40GB of data up and down? Then I pay extra? That isn't much data. If that's what they are doing I'm going elsewhere. Anyone know of a reliable way to check my current usage?

 

[MustISO]

THEY should supply a means for the customer to check. If it's only one PC on the network it's very easy to check with a bandwidth utility. Some routers have this capability as well.

 

[kevnich2]

From my understanding it includes both uploads and downloads. And yes, I think 40gb is ridiculous for a cap. 250gb is much more reasonable (I stream consistently with netflix and my usage comes in around 120gb per month). What type of router do you use?

 

[cbolt67]

I have an old airlink AR-504. It was inexpensive years ago and it works. I have a home network with 3 desktops and a laptop. My stepson likes to stream cartoon network. This could be bad.

 

[kevnich2]

Well you may want to look into a new router that has bandwidth meters. Any DDWRT capable router would be good as my DDWRT has a good bandwidth meter in it. Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 is a good router if you want a good wireless router or the Asus WL-520GU is another DDWRT router that is inexpensive.

 

[NickOlsen8390]

I monitor both by pipes with SNMP off my router.
Basically enable SNMP on the router (if it supports it) Then use a graphing program, PRTG, MRTG...ect.. to graph and give you a good idea on bandwidth usage.

I couldn't deal with a bandwidth cap. Right now I have both cable (bright house networks) and att U-verse. Most of the bandwidth goes out the cable,
and i have a single server that gets per connection load balanced to pull the total bandwidth. between both lines i use anywhere from 200-700GB a month.

 

[kevnich2]

Originally posted by: NickOlsen8390
I monitor both by pipes with SNMP off my router.
Basically enable SNMP on the router (if it supports it) Then use a graphing program, PRTG, MRTG...ect.. to graph and give you a good idea on bandwidth usage.

I couldn't deal with a bandwidth cap. Right now I have both cable (bright house networks) and att U-verse. Most of the bandwidth goes out the cable,
and i have a single server that gets per connection load balanced to pull the total bandwidth. between both lines i use anywhere from 200-700GB a month.

What exactly do you download to use that much? Even with my netflix I use around 150gb every month, on average. Wow. Also, do you have separate router for each connection or a dual wan load balancing router?

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: kevnich2

Originally posted by: NickOlsen8390
I monitor both by pipes with SNMP off my router.
Basically enable SNMP on the router (if it supports it) Then use a graphing program, PRTG, MRTG...ect.. to graph and give you a good idea on bandwidth usage.

I couldn't deal with a bandwidth cap. Right now I have both cable (bright house networks) and att U-verse. Most of the bandwidth goes out the cable,
and i have a single server that gets per connection load balanced to pull the total bandwidth. between both lines i use anywhere from 200-700GB a month.

What exactly do you download to use that much?

he is a pirate bay mirror 😉

 

[NickOlsen8390]

Well, lately i have been playing with RSYNC, and by the time i realize i want to do something different the whole centos mirror is moved to my local server 🙂

I also have 2 room mates that download all kinds of stuff.
host a site or two for a few friends too.

The router is mikrotik with 2 wan interfaces 1 lan. Default route goes out cable, With failover if it can't ping a server out on the internet. I have a few things static routed out the u-verse just because they just run all day and use bandwidth (rsync) and i run a large amount of voip on the cable line. I then have one VM that runs torrents and a download manager. Its src ip gets routing marked coming in the lan, and gets out a seprate default route that is ECMP to both lines. I have found that downloads which come from the same place, Like a few linux iso's only like to use one line. But if it is rapid share, where the ip is alot different on each link load balance nicely. And the torrents work well since its many many connections to many different ip's. Between both connections torrents and some rapidshare stuff can hit 33Mb/s down. I would say that monthly I move about 200-400gb of Legitimate traffic. Like my 2 download happy room mates and the other people that check there myspaces every 10 seconds. A decent amount of off site backup too.