Skip to main content

How To Meter & Manage Computer Bandwidth Usage

Unlimited bandwidth is the dream of every geek, but unfortunately, it’s not always available. Caps are one way for service providers to squeeze extra money out of existing services, so there have been many attempts to introduce them, some of which have stuck.

If you’re on a cap, it’s important to know how much bandwidth you’re using. Sometimes a provider will give you a meter for free, but if that’s not the case, you’ll need to check out a few freeware computer bandwidth usage management tools.

Keeping Up With Downloads

Monitoring bandwidth manually is virtually impossible. Individual webpages don’t report their size readily, and even if they did, there are many variables such as streaming content, automatically refreshing news feeds, and more. Software downloads are not much better. Yes, you can usually see the file size, but sometimes those files are just downloaders rather than full installers, and even if it is the full software, it may need to download an update. How do you keep track of that?
The only way is to use a bandwidth meter that works by detecting everything, from every application, process and service on your computer.
computer bandwidth usage management
For Windows users, I suggest NetWorx. This free software offers a wide variety of features that will help you keep tabs on your Internet usage. It can report and graph your bandwidth usage by day, week, month, year, or a custom time period.
Also included is a bandwidth speed test and, perhaps most useful of all, a quota feature. This lets you set a daily, weekly or month allowance for bandwidth. An alert can be configured to appear when a certain percentage so you know when you need to back off the download button.

Mac Can Do It, Too

manage computer bandwidth
Mac OS X users can use SkoobySoft’s SurplusMeter. It’s a more basic tool than NetWorx, as the reporting options are less flexible and it doesn’t have an automatic quota alert, but it does its job and, like NetWorx, it is entirely free. Please note that SurplusMeter is not on the Mac App Store at the time of this writing. This utility has been around for a while, but it seems to work fine on my MacBook with OS X Lion installed.
Although these are very useful tools, I wasn’t able to find one that reports bandwidth for all computers in a home network collectively. Tools with this capability are available, but they’re focused on an enterprise environment rather than a home network.

Respecting Your Limits

Now that you have a bandwidth meter, you may be wondering what you can do to reduce the amount that you use. I do have a few tips.
computer bandwidth usage management
  • Don’t Watch HD Video – pixel count in an image goes up exponentially as resolution increases.  A video at 360p has 194,400 pixels, but one at 720p has 921,600 pixels, and 1080p is a jaw-dropping2,073,600 pixels. Compression techniques do reduce bandwidth consumption, but there’s no getting around the fact that low-resolution video is more efficient.
  • Buy Retail Versions Of Software In-Store Whenever Possible – yes, it’s convenient to purchase a new title of Steam, but a game with modern 3D graphics can easily weigh in at over 10GB.
  • Use A Firewall – and don’t provide software with permission to automatically bypass it. This will prevent programs from downloading automatic updates without your knowledge.
One tactic that doesn’t provide much benefit is Flash-blocking, script-blocking, or ad-blocking. Using browser extensions to stop this content often does not prevent the content from being sent to your computer. It just simply isn’t displayed. In addition, the amount of bandwidth used by Flash and its competitors is typically small unless it is being used to display high-definition video or play an online game.
Do you have any top computer bandwidth usage management tips? Well, that’s what the comments section is for! I quite like the software discussed in this article – particularly NetWorx – but readers are welcome to provide their own suggestions.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a