How To: Monitor Your Internet Bandwidth Usage

Posted in Computers & Technology, DSL, Internet, P2P, bit torrent, bittorrent by Elliott Back on July 17th, 2008.

Knowing how many gigabytes a month you’re using can be important if you have a metered internet connection, or your ISP measures your bandwidth and charges you if you go over. I know many Universities in the US have implemented bandwidth-overage charges (which students decry as unfair and stifling) to help combat bittorrent P2P filesharing, which will sap even a wide broadband connection. So, whatever your reason, you may want to see what applications are using bandwidth on your PC. The following instructions are for Windows XP / Vista.

The solution is to download and install NetLimiter 2 Monitor, a free application for bandwidth monitoring. If you like it, and want the ability to shape your internet traffic (limit the bandwidth used per application), you’ll need to pony up and buy the full version. Note that it uses the Win PCAP libraries to capture internet traffic, you may need to install them if you don’t already have them.

The main monitoring tab shows you how much you’ve uploaded and downloaded per application, in real time. For example, in my screenshot I refreshed the firefox tab I was working on, so you see Firefox using 99% of the activity. Steam, a gaming platform from Valve, is always chittering to their servers, so you see a .01 kbs from them.

The statistics tab is where it gets useful, telling me I’ve downloaded 95 GB this month, and uploaded 49 GB. You can also click on an application or time period and get detailed statistics across either of those dimensions. Fantastic!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 8:37 pm and is tagged with internet bandwidth, bandwidth usage, overage charges, traffic limit, whatever your reason, internet traffic, gaming platform, filesharing, free application, kbs, broadband connection, pony, internet connection, time period, screenshot, isp, steam, windows xp, real time, libraries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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Luis 4 months ago 1 point
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Any similar toy for mac users?

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http://www.lwees.com

Zhasper 4 months ago 1 point
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One problem: this only tracks usage on one machine. You could install it on every machine, if they all run windows, but that still won't account for usage on other devices on your network...

Here in Aus at least, most ISPs provide some kind of xml feed of data about usage data. I use http://netusage.iau5.com/ - it's a firefox plugin that constantly keeps me updated about the status of my quota.

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http://zhasper.com