Home Networking

Normal all depends.

Here in the UK we don’t have data caps but our personal household usage roughly is 500GB a month between 3 of us on 65Mb. We don’t do anything other than stream in 1080p and I’m the only one who games. I don’t know about upload usage, of 20Mb, never actually asked our ISP.

The UK is on average about 456GB in May 2022. With the UK passing over 60% of households having fibre to the home as of late, that number is likely closer to double that now; especially as more people can watch content reliably in 4K and upload more since WfH etc…

This seems very high. You can get IP scanners which will tell you what devices are using your network, might be worth having a look and seeing if you can identify them all

Easiest thing to do is to change your wifi password. If someone happened to have figured out your password, they might be adding to your usage. If that fixes your issue, then you can likely assume someone was getting a free ride from you. If not, then you can check data usage on your devices and see if there is an app or something consuming a lot of data in the background from your regular usage.

Sounds about right, house of two here, one usually gaming every day for 3-4 hours.

I've got a three person house hold, but it's essentially 2 because the 3rd is 86 and doesn't really use the internet, he does a lot of streaming but all of that is internal SMB streams.

I run a few low use game servers and play games stream videos, a bit of file sharing, and I personally use 1.2tb a month on my PC, and my server very regularly uses 1.5-2tb. I see myself as a higher use user, but that's just my example.

So using a little math, if you were absolutely saturating your internet connection for 30 days straight you should be able to transfer 32,850 gigabytes so it's certainly not unheard of that you're getting 1.6tb speaking of, you're 1.6tb comes out to about 5 megabits a second saturation over the course of 30 days which if someone is streaming 4k is easily done.

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That's all I can say so far. Is there any possibility to check 100% of my outgoing and ingoing data usage? Like every tiny detail, maybe even the programs that use this data?

Yeah there certainly are software, but not for seeing other devices traffic, the traffic would have to go through your pc to see it all with programs like wireshark. Alternatively you can use dedicated router systems like Unifi or Omada and they should be able to do Deep Packet Inspection, and sniff where things are going, neither of them are very accurate though.

I do 2.89tb download and 75gb upload a month. I stream everything including iptv. Your upload seems really high, but the download to me not much. Im I a two person household

If you're downloading a lot of shows or games often, not too bad.

But wtf are you uploading? Are you sure neither of you are YouTube content creators?

More likely explanation is someone leeching off your wifi.

That's a good amount of data use, but if you have 4k TVs with 4k streaming plans, download a lot of games or movies, or work in sound/video editing that amount of data is completely reasonable. 5 years ago, 10 years ago... maybe it was a lot. It's not anymore. You can use that without even thinking about it just by using modern devices and services.

My family of 5 went from 1TB a month 10-5 years ago to about 3TB a month in the past 9. Some much higher too, but around there. We don't try to use more or less, ever. We just use it.

Porn

How are you getting the data?

Is it from your router will it show what device the traffic is coming from then you can look into it better?

What games do you play have they sent out patches that are like redownloading the game?

Family of 4 here. 3 gamers of us are gamers. We stream a lot bit we do not upload much. Download we are at roughly 1.7tb. Upload 184 gb.

If you are at 600gb for upload, that to me, is a little odd and high. Might want to look into what is connecting out and what is being transferred.

My average usage is around 5 TB a month, with the highest month being 26.7 TB of both up and down.

Do you have iCloud sync on a PC?

I had that, and it was killing my bandwidth. I actually bought a PFSense Netgate firewall to get more visibility into what was using it.

Ultimately I found it was iCloud sync on my PC.

You can also see what’s using your bandwidth under the network in windows resource monitor.

Household of 4 here as well.

We burn through 3-6TB a month, it doesn't take long for it to rack up.

Your router should allow this unless your renting the cable company router in which case buy a router and have them stop charging you.

Your new router should come with software to control the flow, just make sure it does that as not all do out the box. Or you could buy a used router and install DTRW or some such which gives you control. It's technical, so probably better off buying new router with software built in.

Check that your wifi has only the devices you own connected, could be someone guessed your wifi password and is taking your network for a ride.

Log into your routers web interface, and usually they have a list of connected clients or DHCP addresses, look for any devices that seem out of the ordinary. Some routers even have traffic analysers, and can point out where your usage is coming from.

My other go to would have been an Xbox, those chew data like crazy.

Other than that you could be victim to a breakin, and your data could be being copied elsewhere, or you could be part of one of those ISP wifi sharing things (Telstra in Australia did that) and have had the usage of other people counting on your usage.

That's a pretty high amount of data usage. If I wasn't downloading so many Linux ISOs, just streaming YouTube, etc only use 200-300GB a month at most. That amount of upload is extremely high, it's even more of a red flag than the download amount. I think either you have a device that's hacked and being used as part of a botnet or else your device's statistics are wrong.

Lots of variables, but have you checked to see what is connected? If there is anything suspicious, you might limit it by MAC address. That said, while smart devices won't put a dent into usage, they'll have separate MAC addresses.

I am alone at a good 4 to 8TB per month. My parents also stream something, but that's only a few GB. 4K streams, Steam updates and downloads.

A single 720p movie can use Up to 5GB of Data

So, yeah, the Download is within range.

Im More curios about the Upload.

perfectly normal might seem a bit high but this day and age with like a fiber connection everything is connected to the WWW and of course with a fiber connection thats nothing its just like breathing air

You should be concerned because this isn't normal based on the number of people, the devices, and what you are using them for. The first thing that I would look at would be Windows to make sure you're not acting as a peer to peer client for updates -- make sure this feature is turned off.

and you dont go by what your router says, router is overall network activity which will be hugeeeeee, to check true in and out data you would login in to your internet companies website like you are going to go pay your bill then go to internet usage which will probably be around 500gb to 600gb per month or less if what you are saying is 100% accurate

Definetly on the high side, my house has 2 tv's a game console, 4 computers, 3 smartphones, and 3 servers (with 1 being a nas), and we're clocking in at around 800GB down and 200GB up a month (3 people)

We're a household of 2 on starlink, we average 1-2TB a month. I don't think your usage is crazy. I bet your PlayStation is the majority.

Screenshot the statistics and post it here. Without pics it can lead to many assumptions.

Here's my usage, living alone (sad I know), a network engineer & freelance video editor, working from home.

I browse reddit, zoom, lark, conference call, social media, youtube, porn, netflix, steam updates, play online games, edit/download/upload online docs, work stuffs, etc just the usual usage at 4K.

Reached ~900+GB per month with average of 33GB/day.

If you're feeling sus of your data usage try turning off wifi for 1-2 days and see if anything. High data usage is not unheard of especially if you have many devices.

If you have advanced knowledge of network you can try monitor IP addresses in your router and see what's having biggest total traffic.

It's fairly high, but not outrageously so. If you're concerned then makes sure no unrecognized devices are pilfering data.

To add to your data our usage is 753gb download and 230gb upload in the last month. I have some packet inspection so sometimes I can tell what the traffic is.

60% is HTTPS, so encrypted traffic. 15% is EA - game downloads and updates 8% web file transfer 4% Akamai - a content delivery network 3% TikTok 3% discord - I stream a lot for my guildies

That’s quite a lot, it’s not impossible but doesn’t really match with what you’re saying in terms of usage.

Sure, I have hit 10TB/mo. I'm making sure I get my money's worth for paying $10 to have unlimited with comcast.

playing games won't use a lot of data. if the discord calls are video that would account for some of it. I honestly don't know what's up. do what others have suggested and change the wifi password

edit: actually somethings wonky if you only have 100Mb/s download. there is no way you were able to download that much data

Does your brother need to check in with you every time he watches porn?

First thing I would do is look at the client list (or DHCP list) to see if there're any devices that have connected you don't recognize.

2nd, change your wifi passphrase and reconnect only your known devices.

If your router has detailed logging as a feature, enable it so you can see which client is the most chatty going forward, and check next month to see if traffic died down. If not, check the logs to see which client was responsible.

I'll say what some others are secretive about. I average about 4-6TB a month, but i'm a cord cutter (for those who know that BS phase...lol ). I sonarr/radarr/HDhomeRun everything, even shit I have a subscription to (netflix/prime/hbo etc). I set a automatically maintained top 10 list and self host everything on local nas/plex. It's 100% automatic, and scripts auto remove old and unwatched content. I'd say 80% of the shit I download, goes unviewed and no reason to keep it for a rainy day. Absolutely everything regarding the setup is vlan'd and exits over a specific VPN with firewall killswitching to prevent leaks. (this setup is only as good as your VPN provider.)

Roku's on everything, but Plex is my media center for the most part.

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I could go on forever about it. Short story, I got my peepee slapped for "sharing" a Buffy the Vampire episode about 10ish years ago(DMCA letter). Scared the shit out of me, that's when I decided to get smart about my setup. Also, since I have older kids in tech at home, I had to make sure all that peer traffic gets blocked locally if they decide to dabble in the black arts....

For two people, non-technical, not using it a ton, it is EXTREMELY high. I never even got close to that much usage with 3 kids playing youtube non-stop in the living room, while using tablets at the same time, 2 adult phones for social media Tik-Tok, etc, two gaming PC's being used pretty much non-stop, and a two other TVs in the house with streaming services.

My best guess is the TV's and the RGB strip could be infected with an IoT malware such as Mirai or another one, and is being used as part of a botnet. I would either disable the TV, segregate it off the network for monitoring, or do a MAC filter on your router and block the TV and light strip from the internet for a while and see if your usage goes down. I would also update the firmware on the TV's and change the password, and check online if your TV is one of the ones with a backdoor "service" account that can't be removed/changed via firmware.

Game updates?

I’d say it’s on the high side, but definitely not extreme

Your upload seems a bit high. Do you have any IoT devices that talk to the Internet, such as a Ring doorbell?

I used to have a Wi-Fi controlled A/C plug to remotely turn on/off a light. I never measured the actual bandwidth but that thing sent a lot more data to the Internet than I expected. I was more worried about privacy, so I put it into its own VLAN. :-/

Prompted me to check our data usage and we’ve used almost 4TB of data this month but we download stuff, play games, watch TV in HD and the occasional torrent.

There’s four of us.