Hey guys,
So first of all - I live with my little brother, we’re both in our 20s. We watch streams here and there, we both own a smart TV, watch Youtube here and there, we both own PCs, and phones which are in the WIFI most of the time.
We’re not streaming / gaming 24/7, but more like a 3-4 hour gaming session every few days in the evening, maybe some Youtube here and there.
We don’t download huge games, we don’t upload anything at all, besides maybe an image here and there, or some videos over Whatsapp.
Today I checked my router because I feel like my internet’s just weird for whatever reason. I then found the “data usage” section on my router, and was kinda… surprised.
1.650.000MB of data used in the last month, 1,500,000MB this month, download. Upload, around 500,000MB last month, 450,000MB this month.
Let me mention that we’re running a 100mbit/s connection, with 50mbit/s upload.
Isn’t this weird for some reason? We’re not huge gamers, we live alone, this is our router, and nobody else is in it. We just enjoy watching streams in the evening, mostly just Youtube, and that’s it already.
Normal all depends.
Here in the UK we don’t have data caps but our personal household usage roughly is 500GB a month between 3 of us on 65Mb. We don’t do anything other than stream in 1080p and I’m the only one who games. I don’t know about upload usage, of 20Mb, never actually asked our ISP.
The UK is on average about 456GB in May 2022. With the UK passing over 60% of households having fibre to the home as of late, that number is likely closer to double that now; especially as more people can watch content reliably in 4K and upload more since WfH etc…
Download, yes.
My guess for upload, P2P through game DRMs if OP is centrally located with low latency.
Gaming doesn’t use a lot of bandwidth. OP says the brother plays 20 hours a week. Let’s say 80 hours per month. It would require an average bandwidth of about 15 Mbps during those 80 hours to consume 600 GB. Possible? Yes, but unlikely, especially since he’s not streaming his games.
You do realise steam, blizzard/battle.net, origin, etc. all use P2P by default to share updates?
I do 2.89tb download and 75gb upload a month. I stream everything including iptv. Your upload seems really high, but the download to me not much. Im I a two person household
This seems very high. You can get IP scanners which will tell you what devices are using your network, might be worth having a look and seeing if you can identify them all
It’s fairly high, but not outrageously so. If you’re concerned then makes sure no unrecognized devices are pilfering data.
Easiest thing to do is to change your wifi password. If someone happened to have figured out your password, they might be adding to your usage. If that fixes your issue, then you can likely assume someone was getting a free ride from you. If not, then you can check data usage on your devices and see if there is an app or something consuming a lot of data in the background from your regular usage.
Sounds about right, house of two here, one usually gaming every day for 3-4 hours.
Gaming doesn’t use much data at all. Unless you’re streaming or constantly downloading very large updates, you aren’t using much data.
Which they are.
I’ve got a three person house hold, but it’s essentially 2 because the 3rd is 86 and doesn’t really use the internet, he does a lot of streaming but all of that is internal SMB streams.
I run a few low use game servers and play games stream videos, a bit of file sharing, and I personally use 1.2tb a month on my PC, and my server very regularly uses 1.5-2tb. I see myself as a higher use user, but that’s just my example.
So using a little math, if you were absolutely saturating your internet connection for 30 days straight you should be able to transfer 32,850 gigabytes so it’s certainly not unheard of that you’re getting 1.6tb speaking of, you’re 1.6tb comes out to about 5 megabits a second saturation over the course of 30 days which if someone is streaming 4k is easily done.
That’s all I can say so far. Is there any possibility to check 100% of my outgoing and ingoing data usage? Like every tiny detail, maybe even the programs that use this data?
Yeah there certainly are software, but not for seeing other devices traffic, the traffic would have to go through your pc to see it all with programs like wireshark. Alternatively you can use dedicated router systems like Unifi or Omada and they should be able to do Deep Packet Inspection, and sniff where things are going, neither of them are very accurate though.
That’s a good amount of data use, but if you have 4k TVs with 4k streaming plans, download a lot of games or movies, or work in sound/video editing that amount of data is completely reasonable. 5 years ago, 10 years ago… maybe it was a lot. It’s not anymore. You can use that without even thinking about it just by using modern devices and services.
My family of 5 went from 1TB a month 10-5 years ago to about 3TB a month in the past 9. Some much higher too, but around there. We don’t try to use more or less, ever. We just use it.
They don’t, did you even read what they wrote ?
Family of 4 here. 3 gamers of us are gamers. We stream a lot bit we do not upload much. Download we are at roughly 1.7tb. Upload 184 gb.
If you are at 600gb for upload, that to me, is a little odd and high. Might want to look into what is connecting out and what is being transferred.
Have you restricted P2P network activity in your household?
My guess is that OP hasn’t turned this off on the game DRM apps like Steam, is located centrally with many other gamers and has low latency. Even if they haven’t bought new games, they constantly update, and then also share those updates.
I didn’t think about that option. I know I have that off on steam, but I am not sure if my kids did.
My first thought was torrents
Sure, I have hit 10TB/mo. I’m making sure I get my money’s worth for paying $10 to have unlimited with comcast.
playing games won’t use a lot of data. if the discord calls are video that would account for some of it. I honestly don’t know what’s up. do what others have suggested and change the wifi password
edit: actually somethings wonky if you only have 100Mb/s download. there is no way you were able to download that much data
First thing I would do is look at the client list (or DHCP list) to see if there’re any devices that have connected you don’t recognize.
2nd, change your wifi passphrase and reconnect only your known devices.
If your router has detailed logging as a feature, enable it so you can see which client is the most chatty going forward, and check next month to see if traffic died down. If not, check the logs to see which client was responsible.
Does your brother need to check in with you every time he watches porn?
I’ll say what some others are secretive about. I average about 4-6TB a month, but i’m a cord cutter (for those who know that BS phase…lol ). I sonarr/radarr/HDhomeRun everything, even shit I have a subscription to (netflix/prime/hbo etc). I set a automatically maintained top 10 list and self host everything on local nas/plex. It’s 100% automatic, and scripts auto remove old and unwatched content. I’d say 80% of the shit I download, goes unviewed and no reason to keep it for a rainy day. Absolutely everything regarding the setup is vlan’d and exits over a specific VPN with firewall killswitching to prevent leaks. (this setup is only as good as your VPN provider.)
Roku’s on everything, but Plex is my media center for the most part.
I could go on forever about it. Short story, I got my peepee slapped for “sharing” a Buffy the Vampire episode about 10ish years ago(DMCA letter). Scared the shit out of me, that’s when I decided to get smart about my setup. Also, since I have older kids in tech at home, I had to make sure all that peer traffic gets blocked locally if they decide to dabble in the black arts…
For two people, non-technical, not using it a ton, it is EXTREMELY high. I never even got close to that much usage with 3 kids playing youtube non-stop in the living room, while using tablets at the same time, 2 adult phones for social media Tik-Tok, etc, two gaming PC’s being used pretty much non-stop, and a two other TVs in the house with streaming services.
My best guess is the TV’s and the RGB strip could be infected with an IoT malware such as Mirai or another one, and is being used as part of a botnet. I would either disable the TV, segregate it off the network for monitoring, or do a MAC filter on your router and block the TV and light strip from the internet for a while and see if your usage goes down. I would also update the firmware on the TV’s and change the password, and check online if your TV is one of the ones with a backdoor “service” account that can’t be removed/changed via firmware.