I may be NZ's biggest residential broadband customer for February.

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › I may be NZ's biggest residential broadband customer for February.

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rjh

57 posts

Master Geek

#597940 20-Mar-2012 21:07

mercutio:

well i'm just interested from the point of view of a web page being able to lead someone to being charged a lot of money without them realising that they were being impacted.

Me too :-)

The thing is, we are all dependent on others generally doing the right thing, which this guy isn't.

If even a significant number of websites behaved this way, the web would essentially become unusable since we'd all be consuming bandwidth at about 1GB/hr, just browsing web pages.

If this guy has 1,000 viewers, he'll be supplying data at 1TB/hour, serving what might as well be a static page. Bet he's not paying for his bandwidth!

I think we really need tools (preferably automated) to deal with these kinds of situations. Usage alerts would be a big help. This kind of thing is going to become more of a problem as network speeds increase, and more always connected devices come into use.

rjh

57 posts

Master Geek

#597941 20-Mar-2012 21:09

freitasm: Either way, to answer the OP... It's not Orcon's fault, so yes, I'm sorry, it's in your bill. Orcon might be nice and wipe part of it, but it's like people going to the papers to complain about paying a large amount of money on mobile data roaming, when the prices are listed.

I recommend contacting the web site in question and complaining. And not visiting it, or not leaving that page open. I actually close my browser when not using it, and shutdown my PC when not using it.

I think I made it quite clear that it wasn't Orcon's problem in my post. I was asking for suggestions on how to track down the problem, which I eventually did - and Orcon were even able to supply a chart of my network usage by protocol, which was very helpful.

It is in no way similar to people going to the papers (or heaven forbid, "Fair"go) which I would certainly not consider appropriate in cases like this.

I have already contacted the site admin (Michael), who says basically - "the graphic refreshes every 6 seconds, deal with it". I'm fairly sure it is a bug, but I don't think the guy is listening.

The funny thing is, this is a FSF initiative, and the data is coming from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology although yacy.net is hosted elsewhere. I might contact KIT to see what they think about their bandwidth being wasted like this, I'm sure they won't be happy.

I guess, each to his own - I rarely switch off my PC and prefer to leave everything running, same with my e-reader, media player and cellphone. Though I do know people who even switch of their router when they aren't using teh internets. Maybe that's safest.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
79294 posts

Uber Geek

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#597943 20-Mar-2012 21:09

rjh: The thing is, we are all dependent on others generally doing the right thing, which this guy isn't.

If even a significant number of websites behaved this way, the web would essentially become unusable since we'd all be consuming bandwidth at about 1GB/hr, just browsing web pages.

This is the summary - the guy is not worried about YOUR or MY problem with cap limits...

alexx

867 posts

Ultimate Geek

#598753 22-Mar-2012 17:35

rjh: Orcon used to send warnings when data caps were approached

That would be useful.

rjh: My Orcon usage page is broken; I cannot see any data usage for the past 12 days

Mine was broken near the beginning of the billing month, beginnig around 26th Feb and then it started again. I told my kids to keep an eye on the internet usage and everything seemed normal for a while. Last Friday, usage for the period was about 32GB, but now less than a week later, it is 66GB.

It appears that there was over 10GB of data per day on the 18th and 19th of this month, but I'm not sure if that's a catch up from the period the meter didn't work or some other problem?

It makes it very difficult to track down data usage when there are several people using the connection in this house and at times the usage meter seems to be little better than a random number generator.

I suspect it's close to being right over the long term, but I've got no idea if the data useage is actually falling on the days that the usage meter says.

rjh: Multiple systems on the network, the likely culprit is Chrome running on Ubuntu.

I'm using debian and with Gnome desktop there is the System Monitor application - perhaps the same application is in Ubuntu? Just watching the Resources tab when you visit different sites can be interesting. Most sites show a blip of data use when you first load the page (and all the adverts), but then the data usage drops down to almost zero (as is the case right now with about 10 tabs open all from geekzone).

Just a few minutes ago I visited that yacy.net site mentioned in the thread and the network download rate went up to something like 90-100 kBytes/sec (and stayed there until I closed the tab).

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ptinson

677 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#598846 22-Mar-2012 21:15

Alexx if you PM me your account i can check it for you.
We did clearly have an issue and i can check to see that your usage is correct.

I can assure you the meter is not a random number presentation device.

Paul

meat popsicle

alexx

867 posts

Ultimate Geek

#598891 23-Mar-2012 01:35

Thanks Paul, I sent you a PM.
Most days the meter makes sense, but some days it is either nothing, or huge, so I'm wondering if it does some sort of delayed catch up or I've got another problem on the days that it is huge.

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