Internet Usage

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 15, 2006 Posts: 4

Hi,

I have DSL cable connection with monthly data limit of 1GB. Recently i installed Vonage with PAP2 adapter. I have set the connection speed at 30Kbps. Everything is fine except for the internet usage. At the end of one month, the total bytes that is transferred is 3GB. I was overcharged for 2GB data. The total minutes i was on phone was around 415 minutes. Is this the normal consumption rate? If not then how to address this issue.

PLease help

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 11:51 am Post subject:

At 30 kilobits per second, it would take you a LONG time to reach 1 gigabyte.

30 kilobits per second equals about 3.75 kilobytes per second. 415 minutes should have consumed somewhere around 93,375 kilobytes, or (rounding up) about 94 meg. Even considering that is each way, you're still looking at (in theory) well under 200MB, or 0.2GB, consumed in that time.

Even at the standard data rate of 90k, you should be looking at well under 1GB for that many minutes of talk time. There will also be a certain amount of overhead for firmware updates, "heartbeat" communications back with the Vonage servers, etc, but that shouldn't amount to much.

I don't know much about the PAP2 (my personal experience is with the WRTP54G), but I can't imagine Vonage would waste their own bandwidth by having it talk to their servers all the time.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 15, 2006 Posts: 4

I agree.. Even when I do not make a call in 24hrs and just leave the internet as such( i mean no usage of internet), there is a transfer of 5MB data/ day. I have no idea why so much of data transfer is taking place. Any recommendations?

Posts: 26 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Jan 03, 2006 Posts: 26

I would check for viruses, spyware, any software that is set to automatically update, ie Windows Update, Anti-Virus updates etc...

You could install Zone Alarm and look at the logs to see what is accessing the internet as well.

~Andrew

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:47 pm Post subject:

i suppose it is *possible* to have 5MB of data a day for the heartbeats and other routine communications with Vonage, though even that sounds very high.

I just ran WallWatcher against my WRT54G for about 30 minutes or so, watching my Vonage WRTP54G like a hawk to see precisely what it was doing.

I got a few minor spikes in activity when I did some test calls to Vonage voicemail (basically to test to make sure my monitoring was working). Other than that, nothing was heavy enough to even show up on the bandwidth reports.

The only activity other than the phone calls was a few small packets sent on ports 123, 53, and, 69. But over the course of 1/2 hour, there were precisely four packets. Not exactly large amounts of data.

Your mileage on the PAP2 may vary. Do you have any sort of router that you can capture logs off of?