[HLUG] bandwidth logging

Tue Oct 12 21:18:30 UTC 2010

Hi,

Well, according to www.samknows.com - place where you live can only support 256Kbps
--------------------
BT ADSL broadband availability
You are connected to the Kingsland telephone exchange.

ADSL is available in your area
Your exchange is also enabled for ADSL Max services
Your exchange is not yet enabled for ADSL2+ services
According to BT Wholesale, your line is very unlikely to be able to support ADSL, although a 256kbps service may be available.

Standard ADSL RAG results
You cannot receive 2Mbps ADSL
You cannot receive 1Mbps ADSL
You may be able to receive 512kbps ADSL
(Engineer visit likely)
You may be able to receive 256kbps ADSL
(Engineer visit likely)
You are approximately 5.30km from the exchange. Note that this is the straight line distance - the actual cable length will be longer!

» Your BT ADSL code is: REAEGEZ

» Matched result using the postcode you provided
----------------

So that pretty much scotches the megabit connection rates you're quoting.  I do accept that it is possible with great care to get up to 10 times the quoted samknows rates (I did when I was in rural Herefordshire), so we're just down to the stupid BT cappings aren't we?

I'm afraid that the story is simple, no ISP (BT included) can afford to offer uncapped services anymore for the £15 or whatever rates that we all 'want'.  If you want uncapped internet access, there are only a VERY few places you can go (Zen, Eclipse - does anybody know anywhere else?).  You will also have to pay around £50 - £100 a month for an 'uncapped' service, sorry!  I regularly suck over 300Gbytes a month from Eclipse on their business unlimited plan.  As a matter of interest, my son who is on the normal domestic tariff frequently pays the normal £15 + another £60 odd for 'excess usage' charges because he uses IPlayer a lot.

As for 256kbps being able to suck a lot of bandwidth? It certainly CAN, the simple maths is that you can suck potentially 25Kbytes a second, or appx 3600*25000 / hour = 65Mbytes / hour that's around 1.5GBytes a day, or 45GBytes a month easily possible, WELL over BT's 'generous' capping (this is only downlink traffic too!)

I do understand this is based on the 256K 'samknows' figure, and if things are good (internal house wiring 'perfect etc'), then 10 times this is 'possible' or 450GBytes a month.........

Sorry, the problem is the ludicrous way that bandwidth is sold in the UK, you can monitor the figures, but it'll only be depressing!

Windows uses updates, but so does Ubuntu, or OSX or ITunes or whatever...... They are ALL pretty hefty these days, hell my IPhone updates are 400 odd megs a pop these days, and you can't blame Windows for that!

My suggestion is to seek an ISP that at least offers unmetered connections offpeak - Eclipse don't count bandwidth after 23:00 until 06:00 I think on their £29 a month deal I believe, but if you want a cheapo connection and need to eat bandwidth, the two seem mutually exclusive I'm afraid.

Regards,

Steve Bushell (ex of Herefordshire, now in rural Norfolk, but at least with a decent 8Mbit/sec connection!)

-----Original Message-----
From: herefordshire-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk [mailto:herefordshire-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Colin Gittings
Sent: 12 October 2010 21:55
To: Herefordshire Linux Users Group.
Subject: Re: [HLUG] bandwidth logging

Hi Andreas,

I'm with BT and suffer large fluctuations in speed (only between .25 & 3 Mb/s but I live in a more remote area) but I haven't had any letters for high consumption ever.

I'm afraid I have no experience of tracking and logging my internet usage.

Best of luck,

Colin

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 21:00 +0100, Andreas T. Ege wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> since I moved to Shobdon I apparently have a problem with the amount
> of data going over my broadband connection. I'm with BT, 10GB included
> per month. Besides the connection speed is fluctuating quite strong
> betwenn
> 1 and 9 Mbit/sec, up to 48 at times, I had one mail from BT claiming
> I'd used 9 Gig, last month they say it was 18 Gig, and for October up to now 7.
> When I was still in Kington I never got mails like that, and I
> definetely never went over the 10 Gig. The set up then was virtually
> the same as now:
> a desktop with first Gentoo, then (and now) Kubuntu mainly, rarely Win
> 2000 at first, then Win 7;
> a laptop with Win 7 (only used one or two months in Kington, though,
> before that laptop with Win XP); and an Iphone.
> Connection speed in Kington was much higher, close to 58Mbit/sec most
> of the time, and usage of the computers hasn't changed.
> On the usage side the only suspicions are a) Win7 updates, and b)
> using get_iplayer to download films/ radio programs from BBC. The
> problem I got with downloading BBC stuff is, that now I very often
> need 3 or 4 tries till somethings downloaded completely, though
> get_iplayer claims to have downloaded everything, but the actual file
> size is variably (between like 5% to 95% of supposed file size)
> smaller then it should be. It worked fairly well for a few weeks in between, but got worse again.
>
> I've just installed bandwidthd as a monitor/ logger under kubuntu
> (there's a win version as well, which will go on the laptop tomorrow,
> probably). The probs I got with bandwidthd are, it's starting before
> wlan0 comes up, and then apparently stops, and it seems to delete it's
> old logs, so I don't get a proper weekly/ monthly overview.
>
> What I mainly don't understand is, that with broadband speeds of more
> then 10times of what I got now, I didn't manage to get more 10Gig data
> transfer in Kington, how do I manage with basically now different
> computer/ internet usage do up to twice the data transfer?
>
> So, to my questions:
> a) has anybody made similar experiences with BT (or any other
> provider, for that matter)?
> b) how do I get bandwidthd to start after the network interface (wlan0)?
> c) how do I tell bandwidthd to keep its protocols at shutdown/ restart?
>
> I just see, that over like the last 15min I got TCP traffic of 9.7M.
> How do I figure out where that's coming from?-- Andreas Ege
>
>               24 The Birches
>                  Shobdon
>                  Herefordshire HR6 9NG
>                  GB
>                  Mobile: +44.(0)7526.315292
>                  Tel.: +44.(0)1568.709166
>                  http://spheniscid.net
>
> --
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