Topic: ISP Usage

[killwilly]

Has anyone ever calculated what percentage of their monthly ISP allocation is used sending regular data to the Internet when running a computer and WX 24/7?

My reason for asking is. My ISP allocation is 10GB per month, last week I received an email from my ISP (British Telecom) telling me that I had used 7GB with 5 days still left to run. Apart from my weather computer which is running 24/7 my wife and I have our own individual laptops which we use for surfing the Internet and the occasional email.

Alan.

[WeatherHost]

That's why I only send data once per hour.

At home, I have images blocked on both PCs so I'm not burning BW downloading tons of icons, graphics, ad images and other useless nonsense.  If there's a picture posted here I want to look at, I can selectively load it.

You're going to be finding more BW caps and overage fees in the coming years.  ISPs are finding that unlimited BW isn't the best way to go when the main carriers can charge for BW as movie and TV video usage increases.

[mackbig]

Mine is about half my usage.  My isp gives detailed up and down numbers for daily usage.  I appear to be using about 220MB per day up, or about 6,6gig per month upload.  My total usage last month was 13.63GB

If you are just uploading to WU and CWOP I would say the bulk of your usage is surfing (probably over 95% surfing, 5% weather). The data is really not that large.

My numbers are where they are based on the following 2 web cam pics every 5 minutes, GR3 radar image every 9 minutes, wasp and nexstorm images every 6, my website ajax updates every 45 seconds, all my vws html pages every 20 minutes, vws jpg's every 30.... plus the data uploads to wu/wfu/cwop...   The download requirements prior to gr3 were pretty low, just the forecast download by vws.(i think)... and of course me checking my own site and this site.  I will have to check, last time I went on vacation I wrote down the usage while I was not in the house, the unattended download was larger than expected, but still small.

Andrew

Has anyone ever calculated what percentage of their monthly ISP allocation is used sending regular data to the Internet when running a computer and WX 24/7?

My reason for asking is. My ISP allocation is 10GB per month, last week I received an email from my ISP (British Telecom) telling me that I had used 7GB with 5 days still left to run. Apart from my weather computer which is running 24/7 my wife and I have our own individual laptops which we use for surfing the Internet and the occasional email.

Alan.

[Anthony]

As far as my ISP is concerned. There is no limit on WB usage. As for my web site. I think it's 10GB per month. I have to admit. I rarely ever check it to see how much is being used. I must not be coming close or have ever exceded it. If I were/had surely I would have gotten an e-mail.

[SLOweather]

For a hardware weather project, I've actually sniffed the Ethernet packets from my device to the server and back, counting characters in order to calculate B/W load.

Verizon sells telemetry data plans by the monthly aggregate megabyte so I'm endeavoring to make the upload and response as small as possible in order to maximize data transmission frequency while minimizing monthly cost for a cellular based station.

[d_l]

If you have a computer dedicated to your weather uploads, you can easily measure the bandwidth used with NetMeter.  It is freeware and would always be running in the background on your weather computer.

Of course if you are using a computer for both weather uploads and regular use, it would be impossible to separate the weather bandwidth from everything else with NetMeter.

[W Thomas]

As far as my ISP is concerned. There is no limit on WB usage. As for my web site. I think it's 10GB per month. I have to admit. I rarely ever check it to see how much is being used. I must not be coming close or have ever exceded it. If I were/had surely I would have gotten an e-mail.

Back when I had Comcast for my ISP they had and probably still do have untold limits. While I never allegedly reached those I was sent a letter calling me a spammer and saying that I sent 1000+ emails in a week which I did not do. I keep a pretty tight ship so the normal virus/malware check was ran with no bad results so I suppose it was the transfer of weather data that ticked them off. I do not sent that much but it is sent often. Thankfully I have had no troubles with the telco's DSL.. Slower than a turtle running backwards most of the time but it works

[saratogaWX]

For my weather website, I average between 21 and 23Gb of FTP traffic a month.  
I have Comcast also, and received a bogus spammer message too   Other than that, no particular issues with traffic.

[W3DRM]

For my weather website and several others I am webmaster for, I use 1and1 and have had no issues with spam or other ISP problems of any kind. My ftp traffic is in the range of 10 to 15GB/month. I do ocassionally get a spam message from my contact.php page but it's not an issue, so far. I am thinking of adding captcha (sp?) to help disuade spammers. Originally I had ICDSOFT but as my traffic built over time, I would receive emails from them saying I was over-quota and thus had to send them a separate payment to cover the overage. The cost to increase my quota was more than the separate charge. Since switching to 1and1, I've never even come close to my quotas as it's in the tera-byte range.

[killwilly]

Thanks everyone for your replies. I have downloaded a meter which will monitor my ISP usage over the next month or so, will report back with my results in due course.

Alan