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?
That’s quite a lot, it’s not impossible but doesn’t really match with what you’re saying in terms of usage.
To add to your data our usage is 753gb download and 230gb upload in the last month. I have some packet inspection so sometimes I can tell what the traffic is.
60% is HTTPS, so encrypted traffic. 15% is EA - game downloads and updates 8% web file transfer 4% Akamai - a content delivery network 3% TikTok 3% discord - I stream a lot for my guildies
Porn
Yeah I was thinking that maybe OP should just change the password for security and then stop digging because he might not like the answers. 😂
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
Sure, I have hit 10TB/mo. I’m making sure I get my money’s worth for paying $10 to have unlimited with comcast.
How are you getting the data?
Is it from your router will it show what device the traffic is coming from then you can look into it better?
What games do you play have they sent out patches that are like redownloading the game?
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
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…
Does your brother need to check in with you every time he watches porn?
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.
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.
Game updates?
I’d say it’s on the high side, but definitely not extreme
Your upload seems a bit high. Do you have any IoT devices that talk to the Internet, such as a Ring doorbell?
I used to have a Wi-Fi controlled A/C plug to remotely turn on/off a light. I never measured the actual bandwidth but that thing sent a lot more data to the Internet than I expected. I was more worried about privacy, so I put it into its own VLAN. :-/