Bandwidth Usage - One Month Later

A month ago I monitored my bandwidth usage for one week to determine how I would be affected by metered pricing. I found that I would squeak by on Time Warner’s proposed plan and would be fine on Comcasts’. I decided to continue monitoring for a month in case the week that I tracked usage was not a typical week for me. As before, I am using Netlimiter to track.

Since June 14, 2008, I have downloaded 33.7927 GB of data and uploaded 8.7236 for a total of 42.5163. On Time Warner’s overpriced plan, I would have gone over the 40GB per month limit and would have been charged $2 per extra GB. I would still be well within the 250GB allowed by Comcast per month. I streamed a number of movies and soccer games over the 4th of July holiday, which was excessive usage for me and definitely raised the totals. Otherwise, everything was fairly normal. As before, I think the rise of streaming media and online television will create a problem with metered access. If ISP’s are going to use this pricing model, it is imperative that the speed is fast and service outages are minimal.

Monitoring My Bandwidth Usage for One Week

A number of ISP’s, most notably cable internet providers such as Time Warner, Comcast and AT&T, are moving to a metered access model where the customer pays for Internet access based on usage. Personally, I don’t think this is a bad idea as we pay for metered access for other utilities such as electricity and gas, but the pricing structure must be reasonable. I do not currently have cable internet access and use DSL so this will not affect me in the near future but the discussion did lead me to wonder how much bandwidth I consume.

I installed Netlimiter 2 Lite, which is a free program to monitor your network and provides statistics for bandwidth usage. I used the Internet normally for a week, between 6/18/2008-6/24/08, and then took a look at my usage. I surfed, downloaded a couple of programs, watched a long soccer game online, torrented one file, worked on this website, and watched some clips on Hulu and Youtube. I do not play online games and did not watch any streaming movies or download any large files, such as a 4 GB linux distribution. It was, I believe, a standard week of usage for me. I’m not one of the heavy users that the ISP’s are concerned with but I believe my usage is higher than the average. I am, however, the only user of the internet in my household, I don’t run my own business and I don’t telecommute. On Monday through Friday there is at least 10-12 hours that I am not using my connection and because I am trying to reduce my energy consumption my computer is almost off during that time as well.

In one week I used 7.4117 GB of data. This was 6.7748 in downloads and .6368 in uploads. My usage was highest, obviously, over the weekend because I was home and using the connection all day long The heaviest day by far was Sunday 6/22/08 with over 3GB of data being consumed. This makes sense because it was the day I watched the Spain vs. Italy Euro2008 soccer match online via ESPN360.

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