Bandwidth Hogs: Lookout!

[Thomas Mathieu 998318]

A major cable USA internet provider [name omitted per VATSIM rules] has announced that it is going to limit subscriber usage internet bandwidth to 250 gb per month or face a possible one year suspension effective October 1st.

 

Not to mention the amount of unwanted garbage that uses your bandwith while you are sleeping, just exactly how much bandwidth do we use? We have no meter to tell us.

 

My question is: On a 4 hour flight connected to VATSIM with:

 

Controllers on line with busy airspace

Active Sky and FS flight keeper running

On Skype having a conversation with another pilot

Playing a few you tube videos during quiet times at cruise

8 browser tabs open loaded with charts and airport info...

How much data is that???

How much bandwidth does a VATSIM session consume?

 

Is there a program that logs the bandwidth being used by my 3 PC's connected to the router??

[Stephen Sculley-Beaman]

Out of curiousity, what rule prohibits discussion of a cable provider's services? Isn't that a bit much?

 

This is a very good question, I'd like to see the answer!

[Luke Kolin]

I don't know of a specific meter, but I will point out that it's awful hard to exceed 250GB/month unless you are running a P2P seed or you have a serious Internet porn habit.

 

For comparison, the Delta Virtual web site gets just under 3 million hits per month on our web server, and we only consume around 140GB of bandwidth every month. Our online backups, mail and ACARS servers consume some more, but even so I don't think we've ever breached 250GB/month.

 

If you're just a casual user who mostly browsers, flys on VATSIM and downloads the odd driver or service pack, I wouldn't be worried about this. It does speak volumes about the service provider in question, and that's why I avoid them like the plague.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Owen Catherwood 903683]

What kind of router do you have? For "Linksys' WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based routers" there's the open source Tomato firmware, or you can get a software monitor for each computer.

[Owen Catherwood 903683]

I don't know of a specific meter, but I will point out that it's awful hard to exceed 250GB/month unless you are running a P2P seed or you have a serious Internet porn habit.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

 

The one in question is a "generous" amount; smaller ISPs have been testing limits in the neighborhood of 5-20GB/Mo.

[Erhan Atesoglu 1050499]

I do about 200-300 on any given month... a good way to monitor what your usage is to go into the control panel and find the network adapters. Under properties there will be a byte count both up and down. It resets after you reboot but there are other programs out there that'll track it non stop. My isp allows 60 gigabytes, and charges up to 25 dollars for overage.

[Matthew Bonnett 1053110]

I do about 200-300 on any given month... a good way to monitor what your usage is to go into the control panel and find the network adapters. Under properties there will be a byte count both up and down. It resets after you reboot but there are other programs out there that'll track it non stop. My isp allows 60 gigabytes, and charges up to 25 dollars for overage.

 

This highly depends on the network card drivers. MOST manufacturers take the lazy way out and code the drivers to only report in packets. Very few these days display in bits/bytes.

 

A program called Netmeter is actually a good metering app, but it doesn't differentiate between LAN and Internet traffic. Though if you do very little of the former, it should be no problem. If you have a supported router, there are a few available third party firmware options (DD-WRT and Tomato to name the two top names) tha have built in bandwidth meters that only track internet traffic and doesn't care what machine on the network is using it.

[Erhan Atesoglu 1050499]

You are right about that. It is up to the manufacturer... my nvidia certainly doesn't seem to support it ;(

 

Also most ISPs that do the capping will have some sort of program to monitor your use, and remind you when you have gone over your limit or are approaching it. The only drawback is the data is sometimes only updated every 24 hours, but its at least accurate.

[Ross Moir 844817]

250GB a month? Thats 57 full DVD's (4.4GB) , or nearly 2 a day!!

 

I use netmeter , it tells me exactly how much I have dowloaded , and gives a good indication if there is any unauthorised activity on my computer. It also keeps a daily , weekly and monthly tally of my downloads and uploads.

 

Any data for online flying , ATC , weather , voice etc is minimal. You will use more data on UTube than you will on the VATSIM network.

 

 

 

Ross

[Trent Hopkinson]

I find an hour flight on vatsim with ASv6.5 running too, gives me less than 10 MEGA bytes (10mb or 0.001% of a Gig) of usage over about 1.3 hours connected.