Internet and the Rain

[hotspur (Chris)]

Ok,i know this may sound a little weird,but here is the situation,

We get 4 GB a month bandwidth,up untill a couple of months ago,it was a real job for me and two teenagers to use it all up,towards end of month,we would down loaded more and more music,movies etc,just to see if we could get it used up!

Now,its all changed!still same 4 GB,bit its getting chewed up much quicker.And i am getting the blame!,all i do is check my emails,a bit of IIS,and photography sites,and a gallery site.Nothing at all different to before.

We figured that i was using when heavy rain and all this cloud (we are on satillite here in the bush),when i could'nt work outside,only a couple of hours a day. Someone suggested that the usage may be higher because when i used it on heavy cloudy days of heavy rain,the beams or whatever it is that has to make net work has to work harder to get through the clouds,Now i do not know if heavy clouds have any effect,so may be some computer expert could let me know.

All i do know is i have a teenager telling me to ease up on the usage and i am doing nothing different to the previous six months

thanks for reading,Chris

[Starkler (Geoff)]

You could try using a free bandwidth usage program such as netmeter to monitor your usage rate.

As for satellites and clouds I doubt it very much.

[RAJAH235]

Now if there were trees in the line-of-sight................& they got rained on.

I use Netmeter as well.
> http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/
I run one for prime time & another version of same in diff directory, for off peak.
Great little app.

[Tandum (Robin)]

It's known that rain will effect satellitte transmissions. TCP is an ordered tranmission protocol which means each packet is numbered and if one is missing at the other end, it will ask for you to resend it.

However, I thnk it is far more likely that the kids are running limewire or some other downloader that is starting up with windows and chewing up your bandwidth. Bigpong includes uplink in your usage so even though your not downloading, if they are sharing, you are being charged.

[DavidTrap (David)]

Do you leave thing like Skype running - these chew bandwidth in the background? Skype is cool, but I only turn it on when I want to use it.

DT

[hotspur (Chris)]

No David,i turn it off unless we want to use it.

I think Robin from Carindale,might be on to something re 'downloaders'

but the kids,i dont think are to blame,there must be some something extra 'down loading' somewhere,

oh-o,the kids are up i'd better go! i get into alot of trouble chewing up the internet

[kustard (Simon)]

If you pay for the internet then you can use it as much as you want!

Silly ungrateful kids

You say you are on a satellite link. Do you mean mobile broadband or do you have an actual dish? If you have a dish do you also then have an uplink modem attached to your phone line? As Robin has pointed out, cloud and rain can increase TCP NAK (Negative Acknowledge) errors over 3G broadband but for simple things like browsing the web and reading emails you wont be using up gigs worth of data.

A few things to try is to install a network monitor as suggested, also if you run wireless to share the internet connection make sure it using the highest security possible and change your passkeys etc. in case your network is being leeched. Make sure you have updated all your anti-virus software and run some scans to make sure your PC hasn't been compromised in anyway.

[AdrianF (Adrian)]

Be careful about leeching. I have a wireless setup at home. I was sat watching the flashing lights on my modem a few nights ago and discovered that even with the PC turned off the modem had traffic and was going he'll for leather, I turned on one of the PC's and connected to the modem and someone else in the neighborhood was connected through my network. I did a ping which was 10ms so they were close. I turned off the modem and have now setup a better password and so far no problems. We have a couple of wiz kids in the area so I am now keeping an eye on usage and turning off the modem when not in use. I thought about using a wired setup but I use an iPhone for access and we have laptops we use when on the verandah so wireless is very convenient.

Adrian

[Octane (Humayun)]

Adrian,

Simply enable WPA2 protection on your wireless and choose a decent passphrase.

I know there's tech out there to break encryption on wireless networks, but, that should keep the script kiddies at bay for a bit.

H

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by Octane

Adrian,

Simply enable WPA2 protection on your wireless and choose a decent passphrase.

I know there's tech out there to break encryption on wireless networks, but, that should keep the script kiddies at bay for a bit.

H

Not everything supports WPA2, so you might have to settle for WPA.

Pre-shared keys can be up to 63 human readable characters or 126 hex nibbles. Make use of most if not all of that.

[michaellxv (Michael)]

To add another layer of protection most wireless support mac filtering. You will need to enter the mac address of your laptops and iphone and then enable this feature.

[DavidTrap (David)]

Having been to Chris' place once, I'm not too concerned about anyone nearby leaching from his wireless network. Lets just say he lives under very dark skies.

Would you concur Chris??

David T

[Octane (Humayun)]

In that case, some network monitoring software would be the wisest approach.

Mind you, ISP help desks will ignore your calls stating that your network monitoring software is reporting X gigabytes, whilst their own bandwidth monitoring system is reporting Y gigabytes.

They don't care for third party systems and use their own sophisticated software for reporting.

H

[acropolite (Phil)]

Chris, your ISP will most likely have a log that you can check to see traffic times and quantities. Also make sure you have no "back door" trojans sending the contents of your HDD while you're not using the system. Another thing that can gobble up your D/L quota is updates, turn off automatic updates.