Suddenlink → [Rant] Unknown Internet Usage while away from home..Suddenlink no help

Long story short my family and I was away from home on Vacation out-of-state and out-of-country from July 7th through midnight July 16/17th. After coming home and checking our Internet Usage through Suddenlink's own tool I was surprised to see to see rather large usage while we were away from home.

From July 7th through July 10th there was approximately 50GB of Data used. 10GB on the 7th, 17GB on 8th, 9GB on 9th, and 7GB on 10th. Like any person should do I had a password for our network (WPA2-PSK) on both 2.4GHz and 5Ghz bands and our guest network is always disabled. We have never had an issue with someone getting into/connecting to our network unwanted at least that is what our router modem says. So after seeing these numbers I sent an email to Suddenlink. I don't know if you guys know but they take almost 3 days to rely to an email some times so I also contacted them through live chat. As usual they weren't much of a help. Basically told me there detector detects internet usage directly from our modem and don't know who or what they used the internet for.

Suddenlink needs to get up-to-date with their technology. How can they call their internet usage detector state-of-the-art when you can't even give us information on who or at least what was done on the internet. I bet they have it but can't/won't share it with the customers.

We took all our devices that could connect to our internet with us on vacation (4 Laptops, 1 Tablet, 4 Smart Phones) The netbook was left unplugged with the battery removed. We have four desktops that were not unplugged but they are no timers set to wake them up, nor is internet wake up enabled. All computers were turned off when we left. The only other culprit would be somewhat hacking/guessing our password and using our internet, or someone we know used our internet while we were gone (unlikely unless some retarded friend of my brothers [can't drive and live far away]). In detail our family's usage is anywhere around 2GB to 10GB of usage per day. We woke up around 9am and left home around 12 on July 7th. How could 10GB be used in 3 hours when we were busy packing our bags into our car? We only reach above 10GB per day when we download stuff.

I am going to check when I can cancel our subscription without being charged early-termination fees as i can no longer trust this provider. At least with Centurylink we had no datacap, and hosting private servers was not blocked. With Century link having speeds up to 10-20GB now there is no doubt we are going back to them once we end our ties with Suddenlink.

As for now I am going to change our network password, and see what else I can do to secure our network.

If you have knowledge on securing a home network even more than pitch into this thread. If you had a similar experience or any experience that has angered you by Suddenlink leave a comment. I am at my limit. I swear Suddenlink made up these numbers as I have 2 strikes on going over the 250GB data cap. No PC updates, Game Updates/downloads, and less video streaming for this months bill cycle.

.:edit:.

Also if you know what the usual terms on cancellation with Suddenlink please leave me a reply. i want to know how I can find the safe date to cancel my service.

Does your router track bandwidth utilization or have the ability to show you in real-time what's going across it?

Real-time tracking, definitely. Bandwidth tracking, maybe.

I went and setup my network again but it took hours. Turned only Wireless N on, changed SSID names, turnes off all WPS, only allow router editing on wired connections, changed passcode, etc. My dad's HTC could not utilize the 63/64 passcode for the wifi so made it shorter. Then I learned that my Wireless router could no longer work on Wireless N only so I had to renenable the B and G signals.

Not really a good day. I wonder if my modem SB6121 makes logs too...

If you were a member of certain 3 letter gov. agencies I bet this information would be provided to you upon request...

One thing I would suggest is setting up a syslog machine for your router to dump its log files in. It can be any system you have connected to the network pretty much, its all in the way you configure it. This will give you the ability to archive log information for review at a later time.

Thank you. I will look into that.