How do i see how much bandwidth i use a month? How can you check?

Question

Yeah i just read the comcast news story and i think it is a bunch of BS. that you can only do so much on the internet each month. How are you supposed to be able to check that? I dont watch movies online often or download lots of stuff but i swear if i got charged for using the internet that i already paid for I'd drop comcast in a flash. So how can I see how much bandwidth I use a month? And how can you tell. Downloading a 700mb movie at 500kb a second..what does that count as?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/technology/30comcast.html?ref=business

Answer 1

700MB at any speed (speed doesn't matter) will count as 700MB, or 0.7GB toward your limit.

You CAN run up 250GB very easy (previous answer had math all wrong).

Some quick math, if you have a 6mb/s connection from Comcast (a common speed for them), you could download straight for 93 hours and exceed 250GB.

Basically that means you could download hard for 3 hours per day, every day of the month, and that would be your limit.

Both me and my wife work from home, fairly heavy usage, currently using a comcast connection, and we push about 2GB per day, or 60/month.  We are up there, but no where close to the cap.

Now we don't stream video on a regular basis or anything, but otherwise pretty heavy usage.

Answer 2

In Vista, open the Network and Sharing control panel and on the left hand side, click on Manager Network Connections.  Double click on the LAN connection and you'll see the number of bytes transferred to and from your computer since the last boot. If you don't boot for a month you can total the number of bits you tranferred.

Now....1 byte = 8 bits

so add together the transfer and receive bytes and multiply by 8.

that will tell you how many bits you sent since last boot.  If you have cable modem then you could have like me, 6.5 megabits per second throughput or 6,500,000 bits per second so divide the total by 6,500,000 to get the number of seconds it would take to download the file at max throughput.

So today.. I sent 81,000,000 bytes (81 meg) to and from the internet.  Multiple by 8 bits and I get 648,000,000 bits.  Since I have cable modem at 6.5 megabits per second I would divide 648,000,000 by 6,500,000 which would give me about 100 seconds at max throughput.  

Let's use your example of 700 meg movie at 500kbps (Do you have DSL or is the movie download being throttled?).

700,000,000 X 8 bits = 5,600,000,000 bits

your transfer happens at 500kbps so that is 500,000 bits

5,600,000,000 / 500,000 bps = 11,200 seconds  or 187 minutes at max throughput.

The article you posted says there will be a 250 gigabyte limit which is 250,000,000,000 X 8bits = 2,000,000,000,000 bits

2,000,000,000,000 / 500,000 bps = 4,000,000 seconds or about 1,111 hours.  There are 744 hours in a 31 day month so with your 500kbps link, you couldn't transfer 250 gb in a month.

Hopefully the math works out... it's 2 am.