On the 19th Feb I received an email from Vodafone stating:

"You have used 80% of your included megabytes on your Vodafone HighSpeed Internet plan for the period to 18/03/2015"

Now this came as quite a surprise as this meant I had used 80GB in a day and a bit as the current period started on the 18th Feb. So I went to the Vodafone site to get more details on my usage and yes according to them I had indeed used that much including 71GB on the 18th Feb and if I drilled down a little further, according to them I used 20GB (19.44 to be exact) in the space of one hour (13:44 - 14:44), 77GB in a 14 hour period (18th feb 12:44 - 19th Feb 1:44).

This all seems like one big mistake to me, and looking back at my previous months usage (I could only find data on the Vodafone site going back to September), the most I have ever used in one day prior to this was 12 GB. Now somehow I have managed to use 71GB in a day including 20GB in one hour.

I run a small tech business from home, mainly fixing computers including doing rebuilds, malware removal, building new PC's that sort of stuff. I tend towards the extreme when it comes to online security - block javascript by default and allow as required for trusted sites, have modified hosts file to stop/block access to a lot of the less reputable sites, that sort of thing. While I don't consider myself an expert I definitely consider myself well above average when it comes to PC's and networking etc, so I'd like to think I would know if I were using 20GB in an hour and I am adamant that I wasn't doing anything that would use up that sort of bandwidth at that time or any time for that matter.

I would like to know your thoughts. I know my Warpspeed is suposed to be capable of 100 Mbps so in theory I guess it's technically possible to download 20GB in an hour, but is something like that realistic. I know there can be quite a bit of difference between burst speeds and sustained speeds. My quick calculation (and I may well be off here) suggests I would need to sustain a speed of 40 Mbps over the hour to download the 20GB. Is something like that likely? Is it even possible without going out of ones way to set up ideal conditions? The hour in question (13:44 - 14:44) I certainly wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary, no peer to peer or anything like that, just normal day to day 'surfing the web'.

I have contacted Vodafone and they are investigating, but given their line of questioning: Were you using peer to peer at the time, how many devices did you have connected at that time, are you running antivirus software, please provide a list of sites you frequent etc. I fear that they are being all too quick just to try and prove that I could have done this, and aren't making any effort to look into the possibility that there may be an error in their reporting.

One thing that did cross my mind and I did mention it to Vodafone is that I exceeded my monthly 100 GB limit for the last period (18th Jan - 17th Feb) and as a result I used additional blocks (4 additional blocks of 2,048 megabytes). Perhaps somehow the usage/reporting from last month has 'leaked' into this months. It does seem strange that the 71GB occurs in the first day of the new billing cycle.

Anyway,I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

CSV file containing the usage data for the period in question is available here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/979vhk7wej8s9c4/HighSpeed_Service_WarpSpeed_100G_18_Feb_2015-17_Mar_2015.csv?dl=0

Thanks