[SOLVED] How to measure my router data consumption ?

Teekiii

Honorable
Jan 19, 2017
56
4
10,535
Hello everyone,
I'm gonna make this question very clear for you so you can help me in the most beneficial way,


What I want : Measure or calculate my data consumption running through my router and where does it go to every device on my network.

Why? : Because basically I think I'm getting conned by my ISP, me and many more users in my country,
see the problem is that our ISP (and other ISPs in my country) offer us, the customers, a limited quota subscription; for instance i'm superscribed
to (250 Gb quota per month / 30 Mbps speed ) so I have only 250 Gb to use for the whole month, and what happens if I consume my 250 gigs before the
end of the month ? I subscribe for additional 100 Gb or 50 Gb or 20, and of course all the prices of the original subscriptions and the others additional quotas are
VERY high compared to other countries,

_
So what happens that they fake our real consumption, or we think so, say I used 200 gigs they tell my Hey you used all your 250 gigs! you need to subscribe for additional quota or enjoy your 256 kbps speed for the end of the month!, so guys please I need a way to just see what is my real consumption, that really pass through my router to my devices and how much each of these devices consume, I tried to search my router for such thing like all packets send or received and i found nothing, so please help me on this thing, If there's a good software with a clean interface like glass-wire but for routers I'd be more than happy to use it

My router is huawei HG630 V2 and it doesn't accept DD-WRT.
 
Solution
Pfsense is actually a unix OS variant that runs on a pc platform. There are some companies that sell "routers" but they are just small dual nic pc.

In any case the first thing you need is another router to put in front of your current modem/router. The main issue is wireless. A router tends to work better for wifi than using a wifi nic in a pc.

You might look at the ASUS firmware and see if the traffic monitor features will be good enough. I am not sure if it actually keeps a months worth of data and you take the risk of losing it if the router needs to be rebooted or loses power.

So you now have 2 boxes. The modem/router and your new router connected by cable. At this point you could place a dual nic pc between these 2...

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
Since you have a combo modem and router it is going to be very difficult. If you had a modem and separate router, then you could monitor the traffic between them. That would provide total data. Per device tracking requires much more than a simple home router. You would have to build a pfSense firewall and enable device accounting to get that kind of insight.
 

Teekiii

Honorable
Jan 19, 2017
56
4
10,535
Since you have a combo modem and router it is going to be very difficult. If you had a modem and separate router, then you could monitor the traffic between them. That would provide total data. Per device tracking requires much more than a simple home router. You would have to build a pfSense firewall and enable device accounting to get that kind of insight.

First of all thanks for you reply,
most of the devices here is Modem/Router comp and you won't find separate modems and routers on market here you either can order them online from another country or find a used one coming also from abroad but in both cases using them separately or even using a very advanced router that supports DD-WRT puts you under microscope for the government as no regular user will need these comp unless he's usually setting up a VPN in his router then he must be doing sth suspicious!


The HG630 router that I have even had a default remote configuration for my ISP server that I can't even change it was grayed and I had to install another firmware for the same router but in another country, that's a glance of how ISP is restricting our use here.

Anyway, could you illustrate to me if i can use the "pfSense firewall and enable device accounting to get that kind of insight." solution on my current router in my case ?
 
Pfsense is actually a unix OS variant that runs on a pc platform. There are some companies that sell "routers" but they are just small dual nic pc.

In any case the first thing you need is another router to put in front of your current modem/router. The main issue is wireless. A router tends to work better for wifi than using a wifi nic in a pc.

You might look at the ASUS firmware and see if the traffic monitor features will be good enough. I am not sure if it actually keeps a months worth of data and you take the risk of losing it if the router needs to be rebooted or loses power.

So you now have 2 boxes. The modem/router and your new router connected by cable. At this point you could place a dual nic pc between these 2 devices running pfsense or if you want you could put a switch that has a mirror/span port ability and run glasswire like you first proposed. In either case you are going to have a machine running constantly to provide the monitoring function.
 
Solution