Internet Usage Meter Guide

If you are like me and share your capped broadband internet with your teenagers you will quickly learn that finding and installing a good internet meter is a must to avoid paying extra money or having your service downgraded. I have been hit will huge bills for over-limit capacity and have had to ensure a week of struggling with dial-up level performance at the end of the month.

I have installed internet usage meters on ALL the computers in the house, including smartphones. Now everyone can see how we are going and can adjust their internet usage to stay below the daily rate limit. As a bonus, at the end of the cycle you can see what download capability you have left and you can pull of the restrictions to consume the remainder.

Most Internet service providers no longer provide infinite or truly unlimited bandwidth, or the prices for this are now far to high. Comcast has stated capping its customers to around 250 gigabytes per month. The popular AT&T is also introducing caps ranging from 20GB to 200GB per month, depending on what service plan you have signed up to.

When you reach the limit two things can happen:

• The service provider will downgrade your service to 'dial-up' speed, which means that nothing will work - even your email will be painfully slow.

• The service provider will charge you additional fees for exceeding your cap. The fees can be very high and may be a real shock when you get the bill.

Why does anyone need 150 GB, 200 GB or 250 GB or more a month? As more video content such as movies and TV series move to the Internet and are downloaded by your teenagers you can easily download this amount of content. Many game consoles, TiVos, iPods, various DVR devices, and even iPads, iPhones and TVs, are fed by the data streams and this can build up rapidly. Also beware of Skype which can take over your system to use as a relay station for other people's traffic and this can consume 1-5 GB per day. Many teenagers user Skype for chatting while they are playing games.

Guide to Internet Usage Meters

There are a vast range of options available which vary between internet service providers and so it is not possible to provide universal on-fits-all advice. You will need to do your own research. Some of the options are described below as a general guide.

• For a single PC, the task of monitoring internet use is relatively simple. Many virus protection applications offer inbuilt monitoring programs. There are many There are many freeware usage meters and relatively cheap applications available. These applications usually allow you to set weekly or monthly bandwidth caps and warn you when you're getting close to exceeding the limit. Some examples of this software are: BitMeter 2; Watchman; Bandwidth Meter Pro Bandwidth Meter Pro. However this is only a partial solution as you will have to tally-up the usage of all the PCs and there devices in the house or allocate shares to the users. You really need to get the combined usage from all users at the browser level. The only way to capture their traffic is at the router level.
• Meters offered by the Internet Provider - Many companies offer free meters to their customers that expand on the usage meters they provide for customers on their own home website.
• Browser Plug-ins and Apps - Several companies offer adds-on, plug-ins and Apps that show a simple usage meter as a bar the progresses to your monthly allowance. Most of these extract the information from your service provider every hour or so. They are usually specific to the browser and providers, but there are a wide range available and you can install them on all devices connected to the router.
• There are various software programs for monitoring usage, particularly for routers that use SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). Some of these routers have built-in monitors. One of the most widely used is the PRTG Network Monitor which is available as a free and paid version.

There are many other options and so you will need to do some research. But for a house with internet-addicted and hungry teenagers internet usage meters are an absolute necessity.

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