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I am living with 5 other people and most of our network is consumed in 20 days so we have to spend almost 10-11 days without Internet. I just wish to know what are the ways to monitor the internet usage of a particular laptop or a cellphone to know which of these devices are responsible to use most of the internet.

The router is cisco(DPC)

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  • Assuming your using wifi what is the make/model of the router?
    – cybernard
    Jul 11, 2014 at 2:04
  • Cellphones usually have built-in record keeping.
    – cybernard
    Jul 11, 2014 at 2:07
  • 4
    If you could load an open firmware such as ww-rt or tomato on your wifi router, it would be relatively easy.
    – cybernard
    Jul 11, 2014 at 2:10
  • The easiest solution would be to Just upgrade your broadband package :-)
    – rfsk2010
    Jul 11, 2014 at 13:12
  • 1
    This is closely related to superuser.com/questions/533361/office-internet-monitoring-usage
    – Brian
    Jul 11, 2014 at 15:37

2 Answers 2

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This is a common problem without a simple solution, assuming you're trying to monitor every device from a central location. You can't monitor these kinds of stats from a single PC, you need to get in the middle of everything, your router.

I've been in similar situations with bandwidth-hogging roommates, I was able to flash my router with the Toastman Tomato Firmware which will allow you to monitor and restrict bandwidth usage on a per-device basis (note: the standard tomato firmware won't break down bandwidth usage by individual device.)

If you want to go this direction, the link provided explains the process from flashing the firmware to setting up monitoring.

It is a rather involved process, and you need to make sure your router is compatible.

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  • 2
    +1 I was going to say the above, but for dd-wrt. If you got the geek cred enough to set it up, dd-wrt has special tools to send data to nice graphs and such. Jul 11, 2014 at 3:23
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A little bit easier approach than flashing your router might be to use an old PC/Laptop or similar as an Proxy. It isn't so hard to set up some software and route all your traffic through that PC as a standard-gateway, then it should be easy to record detailed stats!

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  • I hear OpenBSD makes for a great router (and firewall).
    – DBedrenko
    Jul 11, 2014 at 10:57
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    Raspberry Pi for this :)
    – Cruncher
    Jul 11, 2014 at 18:53

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