Telkom My Pet Hate

[twinscythe12332]

I agree with Pap_sak. First try to justify the bandwidth being used. Ask anyone who is using your internet what they get up to with it. if you can afford to, drop your wireless connection and plug in with a regular RJ-45 cable for a month. if you see the data drop, you'll know that you've been supplying someone else in the neighbourhood (and it may point to the slow speeds being a symptom).

[SilverNodashi]

35GB is massive a month. That is not usual surfing, thats downloading lots of music, or yoy have a youtube/movie addict in the house...of course, a young man in the house can go through bandwith pretty quickly, for obvious reasons.... If this is not the case then you need to check your wirless conections, someone could be stealing your bandwidth. I haven't done wireless for ages, but "back in the day", you should use "mac" addresses for all wireless connections, but a bit of searching on the web will sort you out. My wife and both use our connection frequently and rarely get through 2.5 GBs, never mind the 3gbs we pay for

And don't move overseas, you'll hate it...

We don't know what the OP does with his bandwidth, but since he said he had 7x 5GB accounts, then it makes me think he has planned this a bit Some of our clients moves 60 - 100GB bandwidth a month, one being a very active stock photographer, another doing 3D graphics design.

But it could help, if you want to cut costs, to find out what's using the bandwidth and deciding whether you actually need to move 35GB or not.

[Butch Hannan]

I agree with Pap_sak. First try to justify the bandwidth being used. Ask anyone who is using your internet what they get up to with it. if you can afford to, drop your wireless connection and plug in with a regular RJ-45 cable for a month. if you see the data drop, you'll know that you've been supplying someone else in the neighbourhood (and it may point to the slow speeds being a symptom).

Being a 68 year old IT challenged individual I am swimming in rather deep waters for me. The other three wireless connections in my house are used mainly for Face Book in two cases and the one for Gaia. The children attend school for most of the day so the time spent on the internet is limited as they are normally in bed by 10PM. The people around me do not have internet. At what distance can someone tap into my setup. My understanding is that you have to be very close. My gut feeling is that I am being had either by Telkom or some individual siphoning off my Gigs.

[SilverNodashi]

depending on your wireless setup, someone could get a signal between 20m & 200m of even further. Our wireless reaches to the garage, garden and our neighbor. This is only a 54m AP, but a 108MB AP, or 300MB AP could very well reach our neighbor's neighbor as well. I put it high up cause I want to signal to travel far (I found this very helpful while working on my car and I had to google something ), but then I lock down all the wireless devices (my laptop, my cellphone & PC's on the firewall using MAC filtering, and DHCP based firewalling. I also hide the AP's name so other people won't easily see it.

[twinscythe12332]

okay, well then let us begin the lock-down...
first off, here are some questions: (forgive me if I ask questions that you think are simple. "IT challenged" is a term I've grown accustom too, and it is often by asking the questions in english (or close to) rather than technology-speak that results are achieved)
A) have you got a password on your wireless?
B) do you have a central wireless "hub", or are you using USB/internal wireless connection devices or latops to connect with eachother?
C) if you have a hub, have you ever logged into it?
D) do you know the company name and model number of your devices?


As I stated before, can you justify the internet usage?
Considering I'm a gamer, I am assuming you mean the game Gaia online... please correct me if I am wrong.
Ask whoever is using facebook in your household if they play farmville (the only application I know that can burn through 1 GB in a month)

another thing you could try is to take a look at each of the computer's network connection statuses. it will give a total of bytes kinda like this:

divide the numbers by 104856 to get to mb. if it is abnormally high (like 1000 mb) then you may have found the culprit. ask if they have copied files to another computer first though.

hopefully this will help you a bit.

[Pap_sak]

Being a 68 year old IT challenged individual I am swimming in rather deep waters for me. The other three wireless connections in my house are used mainly for Face Book in two cases and the one for Gaia. The children attend school for most of the day so the time spent on the internet is limited as they are normally in bed by 10PM. The people around me do not have internet. At what distance can someone tap into my setup. My understanding is that you have to be very close. My gut feeling is that I am being had either by Telkom or some individual siphoning off my Gigs.

Facebook on it's own, hardly uses anything - even playing games on it. Not sure what Gaia is though. As someone said, for 1 month, turn of the wireless and go buy some cables. You can get pretty long cables - I use one that is 30m.

Just checked my useage: Both my wife and I use it. Emails, forums, facebook (for me poker!) - she is a graphic designer, so lots of photo's up and down. It's constantly in use. 1.34GB - even I thought it would be more... We've been very happy with our ISP - cybersmart.co.za.

[daveob]

Just checked my useage: Both my wife and I use it. Emails, forums, facebook (for me poker!) - she is a graphic designer, so lots of photo's up and down. It's constantly in use. 1.34GB

Wife and I at home all day, each with own PC. Running online data business. Rarely get above 3gb per month.

[tec0]

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