The 250 GB Challenge and How to Measure
Posted on August 31, 2008
6 Comments
The GigaOm site has an interesting article up about the upcoming 250GB/month cap from Comcast. I must say, as a Comcast internet user, that the whole thing makes me sad. But I also don’t think we ever get close to that cap so, to be honest, I’m not sure if I care or not.
Should I?
The article went on to list some tools that can be used to monitor your own bandwidth which can be helpful. Now, in our household, we have a bunch of computers all networked and using the one broadband connection. I really don’t want to have to install an app on each computer.
I figured I’d share my approach: ntop.
ntop is a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform and on Win32 as well.
At work I use NTop-XTRA on a Windows 2000 machine and have had good luck with it monitoring the primary network. [previous mention]
Just add a cheap hub into your mix and run all the traffic through it. Connect your ntop machine to the hub to listen and measure.
For instance, I’d put a hub between my Comcast “modem” and firewall, ensuring all my local network traffic goes through it. Either use an old/spare machine to run ntop or you can even go the virtual machine route. Just make sure the VM host has multiple network cards and that you can dedicate one of them to the VM image running ntop.
Tags: comcast, monitoring, network, ntop, virtualization
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6 Responses to “The 250 GB Challenge and How to Measure”
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Please read the "Comments" section on the Disclaimer page. Don't use SEO terms instead of a name. That drives me nuts.
Oh, and contrary to what you might have read on some SEO forum, this is not a "Do Follow" blog.
I do think that GChOS will be a niche...
Title wrong?
My last ISP went from unmetered to 20GB or 50GB a month a year or two ago. It was costing me $70/mo but their uptime and tech support was excellent.
I just moved to another with “unlimited” but it has fair use terms so they could throttle when they wished. The cost also dropped to $25 with a dedicated IP.
But my usage is 60-70 a month if both girls are not at school and are streaming movies. Other than that – and if I did not choose to do a full MAME update it’s less than 50gb.
But I don’t torrent or download movies which I guess is where most of the traffic comes from.
Whoops! Fixed the title (from MB to GB). How embarrassing.
I don’t torrent much any more besides the occasional linux distro so I don’t think I’ll ever approach 250. I just gotta keep an eye on my kids…
I’ve had PTRG monitoring my network for ages just out of curiosity sake and DUMeter on my primary workstation for the same reason. PRTG doesn’t sum by month with version 5 though(haven’t upgraded to 7 yet) so I have to add up by hand if I want to know. I don’t yet have to worry about bandwidth caps as thats one way the local telco differentiates itself from the local cable co…no caps. GCI(cable co) has had them since they first started selling cable modems due to the extremely limited bandwidth they had at the time(9 DS-3’s into the entire state then) and they never got away from it.
I may have to look at NTop-XTRA though.
Hey Dave – I hadn’t heard of PTRG before. I was just looking at their site and it looks pretty interesting. Thanks for that tip
Do check out NTop-XTRA though. It is pretty slick.
I envy your lack of bandwidth caps.
Its essentialy a tricked out, for fee, MRTP/RDDTool/Cacti for windows, but its not bad.
ehh…I wouldn’t, with that no bandwidth cap comes a 1 Mb circuit for $59 or 3Mb for $80 a month. The cable co has higher, but I’ve had bad encounters with them and am not interested.
Thanks for the tip, I have been getting nervous about how the cap will affect me as I’m pretty sure I have crossed that threshold a few times in the past.