I’m contemplating moving to a new ISP but there’s a catch. They have a data cap. Exceed that cap and they slow you down, like WAY down. My current ISP has no data cap that I’m aware of so I never needed to know how much data I use. I figured my ISP could tell me. I poked around in my online account and didn’t find that info anywhere so I called them. After being transferred several times and speaking with several different CSRs they finally told me that they no longer give out usage information. Nobody could answer my question of why.
I got the info I was looking for from the ISP’s DSL modem/router. But I’m still wondering why my ISP won’t tell me how much data I use.
It costs them money and they can sell data to make them money. They have no interest in doing such work for you for free. (Remember, it is not just you but potentially many thousands of customers who might ask for that info and it adds up to a lot of work.)
That said, if a provider is metering your usage and will charge you more/slow your data rate then they absolutely should have a means for you to see how much data you have used in a given month at any time.
If you want to do it yourself you would have to be able to access the router in your home (assuming it collects such info). If it is provided by the ISP you may not have sufficient access but, I believe, by law you can use your own if you want (US). If they rent you the router usually buying one for yourself pays for itself within a year. I have my own and the ISP didn’t blink, setup with ease and has run like a champ for years.
I rent their modem, it does collect the data I’m looking for and I have full access to it, including all the “scary bits” that I probably shouldn’t mess with. But I went there anyway and found the info I was looking for, even shows usage for every ethernet port on the router.
But to me this seems just a bit odd that the page that used to show my stats has disappeared. How much extra money did it cost them to link that info? They’d save money by just putting the info out there and not have to pay people to take calls about it.
The OP says that their current provider (that they were trying to get the information from) does not meter their data. The prospective new provider is the one that does, which is why they wanted to know.
There is a “data usage overview” feature in Windows 10 (and probably 11.) I don’t think it distinguishes between WAN and LAN traffic, but that’s probably not a big deal for you. You can also set it to warn you if you’re getting close.
What is the cap? If it’s like 1000GB that’s probably not worth worrying about. If it’s 100GB, that might be tight.
Don’t move to a data-capped ISP if you can help it. They can arbitrarily change the data cap and you’re screwed. Or if you accidentally leave a video streaming overnight, that could eat into your monthly limit, and overages are often expensive or will just slow you down a lot, like you said.
Your current non-data-capping ISP might not even keep per-user bandwidth logs (and/or don’t have the ready-built tools to easily report it). Their CSRs probably aren’t trained to know that level of detail about their reporting systems. If that ISP isn’t close to saturating their upstream connections (to other ISPs and backbone providers), they might not really care enough to have that level of detail on every customer. Usually it’s like 1-5% of users hogging a majority of the bandwidth and degrading the service for the rest, so as long as they can catch those, they don’t really need to care about the rest very much. If your usage is within the “rest”, you’re practically invisible to them, hardly putting a noticeable dent on their systems. It’s usually the gamers, torrenters, people running home servers, etc. that hog all the bandwidth.
I don’t know where in the world you are, but if you can find a fiber to the home provider (Google Fi, AT&T Fiber, Verizon FIOS), those are often faster, cheaper, symmetrical (same speed up and down), and uncapped both ways. Check to see if your area has any “municipal broadband” too; those are rare because the national ISPs lobby hard to make them illegal, but some counties/cities have managed to win and have them, and they’re usually a much better value than the national plans. If you’re stuck with cable or DSL from the national conglomerates (like Comcast), your options are limited.
There’s always the satellite-based Starlink too, if you’re ok with Musk. They offer fast speeds and unlimited data, but speeds can be temporarily throttled during busy hours.
When stuff like this goes away, I first suspect more general purpose enshittification than nefarious obfuscation.
The pattern goes like this: Put some effort into doing a helpful thing well. Then slack off/lose interest/gradually defund it. It gets done less well and people take notice and complain. Finally, something bad happens (injury/crime/accident/unforseen financial loss) and the helpful thing that never benefited the decision makers to begin with goes away altogether.
Take public washrooms at the park. I know they’re in there, I used them when I was a kid. But they attract vagrants and vandals (and wasps!) and require constant maintenance, paper products, wastebin emptying, etc. Eventually, a kid falls in or whatever and it’s easier to just keep them locked up.
For OP’s ISP, it was probably a pain to run (they have to ensure the data is correct), didn’t benefit the company, and everything is just easier when it’s turned off. People will complain at first but settle into a deeper layer of enshit.
Sure, but while most people probably don’t use LAN traffic (e.g. file sharing between devices) most people do have more than one device on their networks these days: at least a phone along with their computer.