Excess usage

[Artmachine]

Our small company has received an email informing us that we have exceeded our BT broadband monthly usage limit during March, in that we exceeded 20.0GB which is over the 10.0GB monthly usage allowed.

The thing is, we can't work out how we have managed to use so much. We don't stream video at all, we don't have anyone downloading/uploading torrents or such, and our wireless network is very secure. Oh, and we're not transferring large files.

We do like to use the BBC iPlayer, to listen to the radio most days, but I can't think that plain audio could use up so much bandwidth, even over a month - or could it??

As far as I know, there's no simple way to keep track of bandwidth usage at our end, so we just have to take BT's word for it and shell out the extra charge every time this happens. Though we will definitely be swapping to another broadband supplier when the current contract ends, as all these excess charges mount up over the course of a year.

[markp]

Hi  Artmachine,

Using BBC Iplayer weather it is for video or radio, uses the same amount of bandwith. You can get programs for monitoring usage for your connection, you would need to search and look into this yourself I am afraid. If you can double check that your wireless is secure, try changing from WEP to WPA/WPA2,this will help in secuting the wireless.

mark p

[Artmachine]

Nope, no way does radio use the same bandwidth as video on iPlayer - radio is 128kbps and video is something over 1000kbps. Nevertheless - I can easily believe it could add up over the course of a whole month.

As far as programs for monitoring usage go, it's a bit of a nonstarter, since we'd have to install it on every computer in the place, and somehow collate all the readings from them. Surely there must be some way to get this data from the router?? We have a BT2700HGV if that helps.

Also, I was promised that a BT person would call us back about upgrading our service - that was three days ago now!

[JohnE]

Artmachine, I am sorry that you haven't yet heard from us regarding an upgrade.  If you'd like to PM me some details, I may be able to chase this up for you.  I do know that the Sales teams are rather busy at the moment, we usually get these dealt with within 48 business hours.

[dwclark_medl]

I have had exactly the same message (Please be advised that your BT broadband usage on xxxxxxxxxxx for March has exceeded the 10.0GB monthly usage allowed) and have been in contact with David Allison in Tech support. My usage is increasing month on month and is unusually UPLOADS, not downloads. It apparently recorded 2GB of uploads when I was on holiday in Austria with a locked office. There is WEP encryption on the router, but that is suspect apparently.

Is there a way of

a) monitoring this at the router level (pointless at the device level as I have 3xPC and wireless phone)

b) stopping this from happening?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Sogo7]

WEP encryption regardless of  key length and randomness of characters used can be broken in a matter of minutes with publically available software. THIS HAS BEEN KNOWN BY BT for YEARS!

STRONGLY advise changing over to WPA encryption, whilst this can be broken as well the process involves a significant amount of compting resources beyond the reach of most or parting with cash to have a specialised service crack the key.

Better still disable the wifi completely and use cable connections to all the works PCs, its faster and more secure in the long run.