O Canada! > Canadian > Bell Canada > [Internet] Bandwidth Usage tracking is incorrect

reply to annayya

Re: [Internet] Bandwidth Usage tracking is incorrect

reply to MrShag
I pay about $50 to Bell per month for internet as I have some discounts for the year. The 165GB I have is good enough for my needs as long as they don't fake the usage tracker.
We can check the talk time on our cell phones directly on the device, I don't understand why the ISPs don't want us to track our usage on the router settings page itself with advanced options as mentioned earlier when I see info on the internet stating it is possible. The sagemcom router that they give us should be designed to do the tracking task so we can claim that the online bandwidth tracker is wrong when we find out a variation in usage tracked by the router and Bell has to agree because the Router is given to us by Bell.

Very Interesting article: »www.digitalhome.ca/2011/02/route···t-usage/

Anyway, I wonder what happened to the UBB/stop the meter petition which had half million users signing to stop the meter for internet. (My friends and I didn't sign that petition just to help small ISPs with unlimited internet option...we thought we could finally get rid of the usage meter forever)

If people in USA can enjoy unlimited Internet, why should we Canadians be worried and check our usage every single day and restrict our family from using the internet freely.

reply to cor3081
Hello I am also having problem with bell bandwidth usage I have installed my own bandwith monitor and come no where close. I have a friend that downloaded 4 hours of netflix used skype to streamed TV and came no where close to my 121gb of usage they used 20 gb for the month and we have the exact same service. I noticed that it was sometime in Jan that others in the forum had a high bandwith usage this was my usage     January 23, 2012
     Total Internet usage 10.832  GB 5.840  GB 16.672  GB
    January 24, 2012
     Total Internet usage 1.297  GB 4.439  GB 5.736  GB
    January 25, 2012
     Total Internet usage 1.172  GB 3.256  GB 4.428  GB
    January 26, 2012
     Total Internet usage 1.971  GB 1.195  GB 3.166  GB
    January 27, 2012
     Total Internet usage 2.911  GB 1.080  GB 3.991  GB
    January 28, 2012
     Total Internet usage 2.190  GB 4.950  GB 7.140  GB
    January 29, 2012
     Total Internet usage 2.066  GB 0.309  GB 2.375  GB
    January 30, 2012
     Total Internet usage 6.030  GB 4.583  GB 10.613  GB
    January 31, 2012
     Total Internet usage 2.342  GB 0.618  GB 2.960  GB
    February 01, 2012 11:59 PM
     Total Internet usage 2.089  GB 0.188  GB 2.277  GB

Have you noticed that you seem to have a jump in your bandwidth usage every 7 days?

Your sample size is low, but that's an oddly regular pattern and I would ask why you have a 7-12GB jump in usage on Mondays... auto updates? Malware/virus infection?

Do you have a second bandwidth meter that's counting your usage to see if the two jive?

reply to annayya
Since so many people are tracking their usage manually and confirming that the results don't match with the stats shown by Bell usage tracker, I want to test it too.
How can I have my own usage monitor when the router/modem is owned by Bell?

Installing a software on a particular device is not the right way to do it because my family has 2 laptops, 2 desktops, 2 tablets, 4 smartphones.

Adding to this, other devices that use the internet are a media player, 2 Blu-ray Players, 2 TVs and 2 printers.
There are only 4 people in the house, so the usage is not crazy even though I have a lot of devices that use internet :P

There is no way for me to track the usage for each device individually.

About the only way I can think of is to have the Bell modem in bridge mode (eliminating it as a router) and putting your own router in- one that can monitor usage.
--
***ATMFAQ***DIFAQ***Kitchen Sink***

reply to annayya

I would buy another router but its a complete waste of money because any ISP would not care about usage details being shown on your "personal router".
Bell was nice enough to tell me that they will remove the additional charges once the bill is generated but they refuse to agree that its a mistake with their meter.

I agree I shouldn't have asked for the source of data due to privacy issues, but the rest I asked is valid. (time and usage by device)
Coming to the terabytes, I don't expect this data to be stored in their servers for ages. The detailed data only needs to be with them for about a month. I am sure 30TB for a big ISP company is not hard to afford to store usage details of all their customers, especially since the ISP loves to have usage based billing.

Anyway, I don't want them to store any data as I don't believe what I see online on their website. I rather see it directly on the router that is provided by the ISP. If each router has about 50 to 100 MB of memory it can store such data.
The least I can expect to see is the amount of bandwidth usage per hour of a day from any device (for about a month)

I have nothing against Bell, its my favourite ISP in Canada. Its just that no ISP in Canada has planned this usage based billing accurately with enough details that a customer has the right to know when he/she is being charged for his/her usage. Measurement Canada takes care of Electricity and Natural Gas meters but there's no one to validate the Bandwidth meter which is currently totally controlled by ISPs.

I came across a few things in the statistics on the router page. Not exactly what I want but it seems possible (assuming they can tweak the firmware to meet our needs).

reply to annayya
I have been through this exact same issue with Bell. I use my own router to negotiate the password connection with Bell and I rotate my passwords weekly.

The Bell usage tracker is always out of whack with what both my router and third party software I use to track usage says.

I went through a huge fight with Bell over this including contacting Corporate Customer Care and I got absolutely nowhere with it aside from having overage charges waived. It took hours on the phone to get those charges waived and once everything was supposedly settled, suddenly, the next month, my bill arrives not showing the credit and when I called in I was told that no one had agreed to that credit and the fight started again until i finally got it squared away.

In my case, what prompted me to start monitoring on my end was a very similar situation. I was withing 30GB of my monthly cap with 2 days left to go of the month so I was keeping a really close eye on things. I went to bed one night with everything powered off and awoke to find that in one night over 30GB of traffic had been assessed to my account.

There is absolutely no way anyone had hacked my account or jumped on my wireless. I take this stuff seriously and my router is locked to only hardware address access for starters and through software that i employ, I get emails if anyone even tries to access my wireless.

The bottom line is that Bell's system is seriously flawed and they don't give a crap about fixing it. The reason they don't care is that a certain percentage of customers will just go ahead and pay their bill without ever looking at it so bell scores bigtime from those folks.

The really sad thing is that over the last year I have gone through extensive testing of ISPs available in Toronto and my conclusion is that there is not one decent ISP available. Whether it's price, monthly usage caps, shoddy customer service etc, every ISP in the Toronto area just plain sucks. Initially I had some hope that the smaller 3rd party guys might offer some light at the end of the tunnel but not even close. For example, anyone that has dealt with Teksavvy and happens to be on the Dupont POI will tell you about waiting months and moths for an upgrade that has never come even though Teksavvy has promised over and over again that ti will be done. Add in the fact that you can't get anything even remotely resembling decent support from the 3rd party guys and it becomes painfully obvious that they are as big of a waste of timeas bell and Rogers.

It's just bloody sad!