You may have been following the recent news regarding the broadband monthly usage caps that providers like Comcast (Etilities Forum) and Frontier Communications (Etilities Forum) have been implementing.  This article does not debate the relative merits of these policies but simply examines ways to monitor your usage.  This way, you can avoid accidentally exceeding whatever cap you may be subject to. We’re going to take a look at how to do this, whether you only have one computer at home or several of them behind a router (the latter takes a bit of elbow grease).

Let’s take the simplest case, where all of your network traffic goes to only one computer.  While I would expect that this constitutes a small minority of broadband users, if you are in this category then you are in luck: you can easily download (mostly free) software that will monitor how much network activity goes through your computer and let you report on it.

Here are some candidates if you’re a Windows user:

And if you’re a Mac user:

If you’re a Comcast customer, you are entitled to the McAfee Security Suite for free, which can also monitor your bandwidth, but this is a potentially more invasive solution that includes myriad other features in the package (an advertised $120 value).  Some people see all the extras as a downside more than a perk, so it really comes down to your preference.

But what if you have more than one computer?  You could put an instance of your monitoring software on each machine and manually compute the total, but there are obvious problems with that:

  • If you are not using a free program then it is possible that adding it to more computers will increase the cost
  • If some of the devices generating network traffic are not computers, it may be very difficult or impossible to install a monitoring software (for example an Apple TV, XBox or Roku)
  • Do you really want to be adding and managing all that data manually?

So until these providers give us an accurate meter, we must find another solution.  Assuming that all of your devices are behind one central router (this is very likely), you may be in luck.  What you need to do is replace the firmware of your router, which is the operating system (OS) the device runs on.  In general, the firmware shipped with the routers has a lot of useful features around wireless security and common administrative tasks but typically does not include bandwidth monitoring.  Luckily there are groups out there that are dedicated to building open-source firmwares for various popular routers.  Once you take the time to modify your device with this software you will have access to a lot of extra functionality.

I successfully went through this exercise yesterday afternoon.  To be fair, this was my second go at the project, following a failed attempt a couple of months ago when I bricked my old Linksys WRT54G trying to install new firmware.  So be warned, there are risks involved in doing this!  Also, check with your manufacturer, but most consider a firmware replacement to void the warranty.  Follow this path at your own risk!!

I went with the dd-wrt firmware, which supports a wide variety of routers.  Before you try to do anything though, make sure your device is supported.  Please note that although your device may be in the table, it is not necessarily supported.  If the note or the ‘min required DD-WRT version’ says ‘WIP’ (Work In Progress) and has a link, don’t go ahead and install the latest version available (this is how I got in trouble the first time).  Read the contents of the links and see if the device is supported.  Then carefully read the Installation Instructions and proceed with the upgrade.  This can be intimidating but is well worth it.

Once dd-wrt is installed, it will start recording your bandwidth usage. You can go to Status > Wan > Traffic and see your traffic for each day and month, and then as you approach your monthly cap you can curb your data consumption.

If you want to look into another router firmware you can give Tomato a shot, which I’ve heard good things about but have not yet tried.

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