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Question

satellite bandwidth blackhole

Mar 23, 2018 5:29AM PDT

We've used Hughes.net 10GB/mo for many years and have never used up the entire 10GB in a month, only 6 or 7 GB at the most. Recently we upgraded to new sat Gen5 with same 10GB/mo package. This increased the download speed 4x and works well. However, with no change in usage habits we are now using the entire 10GB in 15 days! Around the same time as the upgrade we got a new Samsung smart TV, which we have not connected to the Internet so I don't know how that could be suspect. From the Hughes.net modem we run to a TP-Link router then to one hard-wired PC and one wireless PC. We don't download movies, do gaming or any other heavy lifting, just normal browsing and some social media. Our computer habits haven't changed for years but suddenly our bandwidth usage has more than doubled so I'm thinking there must be a rogue program doing constant updates or some other giant sucking sound going on. I have HiJackThis but they are not checking logs at this time. Ran Malwarebytes on one computer with no threats shown and will check the other computer today. I am not a geek and any suggestions for solving this mystery would be appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
Any Windows 10 PCs? Be sure to turn this off.
Mar 23, 2018 8:23AM PDT
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Answer
Re: bandwidth
Mar 23, 2018 6:10AM PDT

Does the modem/router management page offer some options to show traffic volumes from and to the connected devices, either real-time or historic?

Alas, https://www.cnet.com/how-to/monitor-your-data-usage-in-windows-10/ shows that the standard logging in Windows doesn't log all. So you would need a third party program to do that.
I googled TRACK DATA USAGE WINDOWS and got some interesting hits, for example https://www.howtogeek.com/192654/how-to-monitor-your-internet-bandwidth-usage-and-avoid-exceeding-data-caps/

Worth investigating, I'd say.

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re: bandwidth
Mar 23, 2018 8:27AM PDT

Kees_B, thanks for your reply. I went to the howtogeek link and downloaded Glasswire, which looks like it might help me figure out what's using excessive bandwidth.

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Answer
The other data sink is sync.
Mar 23, 2018 8:26AM PDT

Another area that eats data are syncs. Chrome, Firefox and more SYNC data so with each login or on a timer these apps and even the OSes sync up and eat data. This is a big change from just a few years ago.

I can't list them all but if you use an email login on Windows, Office 365 or such, these eat bytes.