Check your Data Usage

Part 2 - Gathering information

So, you've convinced yourself that there are no obvious reasons why your bytes could be being used unintentionally. How do you go about gathering the hard information about what data is actually being transmitted and received, in order to challenge the statistics provided by Sure?

The central problem for a broadband customer like you and me is that in trying to gather counter-evidence, we cannot monitor the traffic at the point where the data goes into and out of our houses or offices, because the standard routers and modems do not provide such a facility (you may have upgraded your router so that you do have such a facility, but most of us use the router that we were obliged to buy from Sure). Monitoring the traffic at the computer itself may give you sufficient information as long as you use the right monitoring tool (program), but if you have more than one computer that can use the same router, the problem gets more compllicated.

After researching the range of tools available (at least the ones that are affordable, as many are completely out of price reach of the average user), I have come across a program that seems to fit the bill in almost every respect:

• it is easy to install
• it is easy to use
• it is affordable (it is free!)
• it provides you with the monitoring tools you need, and...
• it works in situations where the router is used by more than one computer

The program I am referring to is called:

NetWorx (from a company called SoftPerfect)

Here are some of the most useful features:

1. It recognises three types of charging – peak-time, off-peak time and unmetered
2. The charging types can be associated with each of 24 hours for each of 7 days a week, so setting up 00:00 – 06:00 as off-peak for us is a doddle (I use off-peak rather than unmetered so that it actually measures the traffic even if we pay nothing for it.)
3. It can be told to ignore local network traffic (on your LAN or wLAN if you have one)
4. It produces on-demand reports of usage, by day, week, month or total to-date
5. It can measure the instantaneous transfer speeds
6. It can identify traffic originated and consumed by specific applications on your computer
7. You can export the collected data in CSV format, so that you can write your own reports if you wish
8. It allows you to set quotas for on-peak and off-peak daily usage, and generate alerts and/or email notifications if the quotas are breached
9. It allows all of the above on a user-by-user basis too
10. ... and lots of other stuff such as NetStat which shows a real-time view of traffic by application

Unfortunately, (for some), the program only works on Windows, so anyone with a Mac or a smartphone won’t be helped. But – and this is the big PLUS for me – it solves the problem of not being able to measure traffic at the router. If you have more than one computer connected to your router, you will only ever get part of the story with every other monitor I’ve looked at. With NetWorx, you can...

11. Run a copy of the program on all of the computers on your local area network – NetWorx can then automatically share data among all of the computers (they call it sync’ing, but this term is a bit misleading). So, at any of the NetWorx program user interfaces you can create an on-screen and/or printable report which includes usage data from ALL of the computers running NetWorx, so you get a complete picture of the data going into and coming out of your router in real time and as an historical log.

 

Installing and configuring is relatively easy.

First, download the program. It's only 4.1MBytes (if that sounds a lot, you shouldn't be using Facebook!) Here is the link:

https://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/ (Version: 5.4.1, 8 August 2015)

Install the program with all default settings on every computer that can access the internet. You will need Administrator privileges to do this. By default, NetWorx will start up automatically when you start your computer, so it will be monitoring network traffic at every moment you are switched on.

Next - make sure that the program is properly configured on all computers. It is most likely that they will need identical configuration.

 

Prev: Part 1 - The Problem and some practical hints

Next: Part 3 - Configuring NetWorx