My Bell Canada plan gets me 60GB bandwidth a month, and apparently I went all the way up to 75 last month. Considering the bulk of my wi-fi usage consists of A) message boards; B)Whatsapp; C) Facebook; and D) Watching in excess of 2 hours of youtube videos a month, I call bullshit on this.
I called their tech support to figure out how to access the weird proprietary modem/router combo they force me to use. I see that there’s 12 devices connected to my router, of which I recognize 6 or 7 (printer, my tablet, laptop, phone, mom’s tablet, her computer). Problem is, whether it is the mysterious connections or mine, I don’t know what’s sucking up the data at this alarming rate. By comparison, in the period of February to June, my bill says I averaged 15 GB a month. Then for the past two months it’s increased nearly 400%.
Is there a way to use 3rd party software to look at my devices, and put a GB amount next to each of them, to figure out who in my house (and which device) is the offending data hog, or if not, which one of my neighbors has stolen my WPA key?
You’ve asked two questions
1)Checking bandwidth
2)Checking attached devices
1)There may be a meter built into the router, if there is you just need to turn it on and keep an eye on it, you may even be able to set it up to alert you in one way or another when you get to a preset limit each month.
2)Checking attached devices. That’s trickier since they tend to attach themselves with MAC addresses unless you gave them some kind of nice name (which most people don’t). You can do some things to fix this, but it’s kind of an active solution (as opposed to passive). Like Gus said, the easiest way is to change your wifi password and reattach all your known devices. As other things in your house stop working that’s when you’ll say “Oh yeah, the DVD player, forgot about that” or “I had no idea that clock was attached to the internet, wonder who set that up”. Also, change the router password as well…it isn’t still set to Admin, is it?
That’s the easiest thing to do, start there.
I think the simplest approach is to setup your router to limit access to specific, preapproved devices, based on their MAC (hardware) addresses. Start by only granting access to those devices that need access and then slowly add other devices on an as-needed basis. Not only might you narrow down the culprit this way, but you will gain some clarity as what all of those unknown devices are.
The other option is to buy a router/access point with the native capability (or one that has the ability to run custom firmware that has the same capability) to monitor and manage bandwidth usage by device. You would plug the new device into your original one, configure all wifi devices to connect to the new one, then lock down the original by changing the password, turning off wifi, or otherwise not accepting any connections.
And now, a quick WAG: You don’t happen to have a smart TV whose usage you might not be considering, do you?
I don’t have a smart TV, no! The Internet devices I have, off the top of my head:
Android phone
Mom’s nook
Ipad
Ipod touch (set to airplane mode 99.9% of the time)
Nintendo 3DS
Desktop
Laptop
Phillips hue with two bulbs.
I’m very curious about the traffic monitoring router option. Can you suggest one?
Ideally, my goal is to write a Mac address down for each device, look at their bandwidths, and figure out what’s using the data, and when. From there, I could narrow it down to a few apps or programs.
If you want something reasonably priced and off the shelf, but that still has some *very *powerful capabilities, I’d recommend something like this Buffalo WZR-600DHP, or really anything else that comes preinstalled with, or is capable of being upgraded to run DD-WRT firmware.