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I haven't seen any reliability issues yet. And I have the same issue with cutting the land line - we use ooma now. $120 or so buy in, $4/month taxes and fees. For the 5 calls we get / day, it's about the right price.
TV services - I'm waiting for the breakup of the packages. If Netflix and the other companies keep rolling out their own material, it may happen sooner. I only watch maybe 6 shows other than an occasional movie, I'm tired of subsidizing all of the other garbage out there.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Roku Warning: it can accidentally be left streaming whilst you aren't watching anything. Happens at home, although rarely.
Solutions for that: one Roku is in an energy saver power strip which has a master/slave relationship with several of the sockets. If TV off, Roku is powered off in about 30 sec.
I'm planning on doing the same for the other as it was on all day, no one home, on Tuesday.
Fortunately (for now) my ISP, CableVision, doesn't meter usage at this time. Possibly with ulterior motives, they're actually advertising to cable-cutters even though the supply telephone & cable TV along with internet. They do not have any kind of contracts.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Good point about roku. But I know that mac address, and there is nothing going there. Might be I need to set up that suggested proxy server just to see who is using what.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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One way to get attention is to say you will begin legal action. I developed software for a call center here in Canada. As soon as legal action was mentioned, the issue was immediately moved up the chain to people who would listen. Who knows, it might really be a case for legal action.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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Well, so far it's a matter of whose data do you believe? I don't have enough yet in my arsenal to nuke them. But I'm working on it. Besides, it's a good exercise in technical skill development.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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I have the same provider and have been able to track and manage usage by installing software at the router. I'm using Gargoyle router management software https://www.gargoyle-router.com. If you have a compatible router, I'd suggest trying that. The software not only measures usage, but allows setting of quotas for usage. The usage totals from Gargoyle are within a couple of percent of those from the ISP, as there is some traffic that hits the modem that does not make it to the router (filtered at the modem).
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 I've been hesitant to flash my router, but I may do so. No guts, no glory. I just don't want a brick.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Why don't you just hit them with consumer complaint and technical literate lawyer? 800 GB per month is a lot. I mean a lot... I've been downloading torrents for since 2007 and I've downloaded a lot... Really a lot. From the same tracker... My bandwidth with the tracker is almost 4 TB. That is for 8 years... Your family/users can be 5-10 people at the same router but 800 gigabytes is really a lot of info to be streamed/downloaded/pulled or whatever.
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You've just touched on the infuriating part. I was discussing this with "a" tech. I have no idea what his qualifications were, he's probably just looking at a web site fed by some internal system. I pointed out that we weren't just a little over, but an absurd amount that would make me question the sanity of his #s.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Maybe they're using your data for you by making WiFi available to their other customers through your router? An example article about the issue: Comcast Was Sued For Quietly Turning Customers' Home WiFi Into "Public" Hotspots[^]. As I recall from when this broke, they're not supposed to be tagging that data usage onto your bill, but maybe they are.
If you can get daily data usage results, unplug everything from their line for a day and see if they're still claiming data usage on your line. If so, then fight, fight, fight, or switch.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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At what point would you get a sick feeling at this dirty trick? Wow. The good news is that I refused their box and have my own. So I think we're okay there.
"unplug"
I did this yesterday morning. Usage dropped to zero. Going to start adding stuff back in. No heavy users are in the house. 16 yo returns home from a school outing at 1, the 13 yo youtube fanatic is home at 3. So far, very little usage.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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charlieg wrote: The good news is that I refused their box and have my own. So I think we're okay there
This is hypothetical since your usage suggests this isn't what's happening, but... maybe, maybe not. Think it through -- how do they set up gobs of routers like that? Not manually, so by script. It'd have to recognize multiple types of routers and probably automatically configure every new router added to their system. How's it going to do that from the public WAN side? Via a hardcoded backdoor or via a backdoor into the cloud management service. You still sure its impossible for them to configure the router hardware you bought?
Your best bet may be to do as that article suggests -- disable the WiFi on the router and use a separate access point device that is connected downstream of your router. Still no guarantee that they don't scan your internal network to find and configure it through, but they're probably not that sophisticated yet. If you're worried, load one of the open source router firmware loads onto it.
"usage"
Maybe one of your kid's computers is infected and being used as a torrent server without their knowledge. Might be worthwhile turning them on one at a time before the kids get home and start using data to see if usage jumps.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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The Comcast supplied boxes have WiFi built in - two antennas, etc, which is how they abuse the system. Mine is a standard surfboard from Motorola, no WiFi at all.
usage - dead on. They are trickling back in... we'll see how it goes.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Probably totally unrelated but I had a similar occurrence about a year ago and it turned out to be OneDrive. It had got itself into some sort of updating loop and started eating data voraciously. It chewed a month's limit in a day. It was also a little hard to track down as Windows seemed to hide the data use.
None of this explains your router figures but, if you are using OneDrive, try turning sync off and see if things improve.
Paul Hooper
If you spend your whole life looking over your shoulder, they will get you from the front instead.
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Silly question are you checking only download rates or combining with upload? I'm not in the US so I'm not familiar with the ISP's there  . Back in the day one of my ISP's did calculations by combining down/up rates to get more out of their customers.
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I'm down into the cable modem guts at this point. I can track the Total Unerrored Codewords which gives me a very accurate measure of how much data is coming into the modem. In the past 1.15 days, I see 11GB. About as close to the metal as I can get. Off on jury duty, so haven't done much the last few days.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Split up 50415002.71828500 (6)
You literally need to split up the number.
PooperPig - Coming Soon
modified 17-Sep-15 7:55am.
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Divide?
veni bibi saltavi
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Are you looking over my shoulder?!
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You win!
Now, why?
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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I had no idea except the breaking up think. Tomorrow I woill revert the CCC to using bloody words! 
veni bibi saltavi
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Bah!
I thought it was bloody clever, me, so I did.
And I still don't get all the clues from your Queen thing - I wasn't answering it I was insulting you!
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Clue 0 - Jezza's band?
Jeremy Corbyn is anti monarchy, cruel twist.
Clue 1 - Followed Mr Wiggins
Bradley Wiggins, aka 1st British winner of Tour de France, a Bicycle Race.
Clue 2 - Though some have fallen, May go on forever
Freddy went *poof*, but Brian May goes on and on.
veni bibi saltavi
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Blimey!
Had to google Jeremy and Bradley - us non-poms don't keep up with such parochial news!
No way one would have found Jeremy Corbin from Jezza and related it (no mention of anti-monarchism on Wiki for example!)
Mr Wiggins similarly - although a certain Nicole Wiggins has some fine photos on Instagram!
And it's a stretch from capitalisation of May (one assumed a typo) through "going on forever"
Well done!
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Divide.
I have no idea why - it's just a WAG...
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