As I’m sure you’ve probably heard around the web, some of the major ISPs want to start limiting the amount of data that you download each month. When you go over your limit you’ll be charged by the gigabyte.
If you’re lucky enough, when your ISP starts limiting your bandwidth, you can move to a new ISP. They don’t seem to see anything but dollar signs and when they start losing customers things seem to magically get better. But if you’re in the unfortunate majority that has no other choice, you can either start monitoring your bandwidth or you can ignore it and pay the overage charges.
I’ve been using a great little tool to monitor my monthly bandwidth on my computer called Bandwidth Monitor Lite. It watches your network interface and keeps a daily log of how much bandwidth you’ve used. The best part is that the Lite version is free. There is also a Pro version with a few more features that you can buy if you’d like.
If you have multiple computers as well as entertainment systems that use bandwidth, some routers have bandwidth monitoring built in. If yours doesn’t though you can use an application called PRTG to monitor the traffic on your router. Your router must support SNMP to use this application, unfortunately mine doesn’t.
That PRTG looks like a great little tool, and from what I see, the freeware version does packet sniffing. I may have some good use for it.
Thanks for pointing it out!