geekIT: (coffeebaron, you asked if I "still have a VFX VoIP line" with XNet? No, I've never had the need for VOIP)

As I noted earlier, the consensus of opinion seems to be that I should have my modem firewall ON, so it's done. However, it hasn't affected my 'upstream' data traffic in any way.

Regarding this traffic, many of you are saying that your own usage figures are in accordance with mine - ie, 10%-14% of data traffic is UPLOADS.

Fair enough, if that's the way the game is played. But I would suggest that the bulk of internet users, in NZ and the rest of the world, would be totally unaware of this situation. Also, I still don't understand why the upstream traffic is so hefty. Meaty downloads I can accept: Movies and TV episodes can be anything from 150MB to 10G. But 'straight' data - which is what I imagine packet requests and acknowledgments to be, shouldn't be that bulky, IMHO. I mean, anyone who's ever downloaded an eBook knows that entire novel of 150,000 words is rarely larger than a few megabytes. So where does the volume come from?

And why the variation in volume? Referring to my table of traffic that I posted earlier, the ratio of uploads to downloads on 6th Dec was 64% and on 24th Dec 4.6%.

I don't mean this unkindly, so I hope nobody takes offense, but there's been a considerable amount of supposition in this thread, rather than hard knowledge, and it seems to be that many of you are curiously incurious about this business. I think it's time we heard the facts from a telecommunications engineer.

I'll email Campbell Live and see if it arouses their interest.

I'm yet to be convinced there is any issue here so I hope you're not going to end up leading Campbell Live on a wild goose chase.

Just because internet users may not understand how TCP works doesn't mean anything is broken. Most people don't understand how an internal combustion engine works either. If you're sending 1500 byte TCP packets the ACK size is the same 40 bytes as it is sending 64 byte TCP packets, so the ratio between upload/download will change accordingly. If you were transferring a lot of data over WiFi this could also result in very different results as well due to WiFi being a half duplex medium, so TCP performance over WiFi will always be far worse than UDP. TCP retries on WiFi are a really common real world issue.

Something could have easily happened to your router on that day causing a big spike, the most obvious cause would have been a DNS amplification attack because of your firewall being disabled (and assuming the modem responded to DNS requests, which I believe it does with the firewall disabled).

Without trying to have a dig at you I think you simply need to accept that nothing is wrong - and if you want to understand more then learning a little about how TCP works will help a lot.