Broadband Useage Measurement

[woodshavings]

Hi,
I currently have an unlimited broadband connection with Wanadoo but it costs £27.99 a month. I would like to measure my actual Gigabyte useage to judge if I can reduce my costs with a limited useage connection.

Is there any software that can monitor actual useage available?

Thanks

John

 

[wizer]

im not sure about usage monitors. But I can say that if you are just surfing the net and downloading the odd file then you'll be using next to nothing. £28 is a hell of a lot to pay for broadband. I am with http://www.efhbroadband.com and pay £9.99.

 

[Anonymous]

Mmm, not aware of any off the top of my head; BT are introducing something beginnning of May for their subs, but that's no use to you. If it were me, I'd think about using something like ethereal to monitor net usage, but that's a bit of overkill, and certainly not suitable if you're not IT or datacomms savvy (apologies if you are). You could always wander over to sourceforge see if they have anything (http://www.sourceforge.net) - all open source/gpl type stuff - do a search.

 

[woodshavings]

Hi Wizer

I agree if it was just for surfing etc but the problem is that I also edit a local newsletter and send/receive photos etc, as well as the final magazine to the printers in a pdf form.

I do need to measure it to make sure of my real useage


John

 

[woodshavings]

Hi ES, thanks for the link - I'll have a look.

Your comment about IT savvy hit a very sensitive nail !!!! About a million years ago I was a sort of pioneer in the IT world with real time, machine and assembler code programming in the days of PDP8s, 11s etc. Trouble is, with this world of bloatware, I've lost the plot!! I should be able to write the code to do what I want, but sadly no longer.

Cheers, John

 

[Anonymous]

Tell me about it John - I remember being limited to 4k of total program size, writing in IBM 370 assembler on real-time transactional systems - that's what I did for the first 4 years of my working life! I avoid the world of bloatware by limiting my programming talents to unix systems these days, very much still in real-time. More and more I just design the stuff, and let other people deal with Bill Gates' monsters.

At least if you have that sort of background, you won't be scared by sourceforge, and will be happy to know that the contributors there are probably more like you than the monkeys who consume computer resource because they're lazy/untalented!

 

[UKTony]

Hi ES, thanks for the link - I'll have a look.

Your comment about IT savvy hit a very sensitive nail !!!! About a million years ago I was a sort of pioneer in the IT world with real time, machine and assembler code programming in the days of PDP8s, 11s etc. Trouble is, with this world of bloatware, I've lost the plot!! I should be able to write the code to do what I want, but sadly no longer.

Cheers, John

Now your talking John. I rememeber at college in the 80's i had to wirewrap a PDP.....4000 bits of wire just to light 8 bloody LED's

 

[frank]

any members on ntl broadband ,phone them up and ask for the free upgrade

 

[woodshavings]

UKTony said:
Now your talking John. I rememeber at college in the 80's i had to wirewrap a PDP.....4000 bits of wire just to light 8 bloody LED's[/

Oh memories, memories - I was involved in the Black Arrow project - wire wrapped backplanes on the the ground station computer hardware (not DEC) - at least you could fault find by unwrapping to isolate the pin/circuit !

John

 

[RogerS]

Woodshavings

Do you use a router and if so which model? Some are SNMP capable in which case there are some freeware programs that will mionitor your usage. I did look into this a while ago and will dig out what I can find.

Roger (built his first three computers - 6800, Z80 and 80186 - hardware designed homebrew Apple II synchronous comms card running ICL CO1,2 and 3 protocols - boy, you should see the jaws drop on ICL mainframe die-hards when my little Apple II computer emulated perfectly their £10,000 ICL proprietary terminal!)

 

[wizer]

Quick google search pulls up the following

http://www.absolutefuturity.com/BBMonit ... onitor.htm

 

[wizer]

and this on sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntm/

 

[OLD]

This info from my ISP :-
Here are some examples of how much data you might transfer for popular online activities. These figures are based on using a 512k connection.
'Monthly' Data Transfer Examples
1GB 3GB 5GB
Surfing 4 hours a day 12 hours a day 20 hours a day

Email with attachments 15 a week 45 a week 75 a week

Email 100 a week 300 a week 500 a week

Downloading songs and short video 10 songs or clips a week 30 songs or clips a week 50 songs or clips a week

Listen to online radio 2 hours a week 6 hours a week 10 hours a week


These are examples of usage, not limits. Other online activity can result in data transfer. Please note, this is only an approximate guide.
I have a 1mhz link with two users and do not exceed 2 GB per month.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi John,

I have a wee program that sits in the sys tray called netmeter which monitors the amount that is uploaded/downloaded on a weekly, monthly and total basis. Its free and can be got from here:

http://readerror.gmxhome.de/

Aidan.


oops theres 28.64 gb downloaded this month :-0

 

[woodshavings]

Many thanks to all who replied. I got some very useful information.
The program identified by Aidan is exactly what I wanted - this really is a great forum with so many helpful members.

Now to get a better (I hope!) broadband deal.

Thanks

John

PS At 28 gb Aidan, I guess you must have some video downloads!

 

[Anonymous]

errrm,


Well, err, could i tell you i lost my copy of service pack 2, twenty eight times and had to re download it

 

[RogerS]

Oh, Aidan....you could have had one of my spare CD copies :lol: