Proxy or Router?

[scjohnson243]

Good Afternoon Friends.

I have a Exceed sattelite internet connection at home, we get 15g a month before it slows itself to something so slow that I cant even connect. Usually this 15g is gone in the first week or so of our billing cycle. I have been fighting this for about 6 months, turning auto connect off to my network and turning off wireless connections to my PS4/XBox1, My son and daughter both have cell phones and they swear they are not doing it online.. I would like once and for all take control of this.

I could either setup a proxy that can monitor my home network and tell me the exact amount of data by device(I think?) or get a router where I could pull a report that tells me how much data was used by which ip over a specific range.

Has anyone encountered this problem? and if so what would you do to handle it? any details would be awesome, tutorials on the web etc would be most welcome.

Thank you very much everyone...

EDIT: Wow - I will leave this open till tomorrow but thatsa hard to believe that there is not some simple plug and play type device I could plug into the router, or before the router to just monitor how much data is used by device/ip over a date range.... I was hoping for something simple, guess it is more complicated than I would have thought

 

[bill001g]

It is hard to force a proxy and some types of traffic will not pass though a proxy even if you have it.

This is not a common feature in a router. You would think as they run out of new things to have in routers they would add the ability to monitor traffic. Part of the problem is saving the data someplace and then having enough processor power to generate reports.

Third party router firmware is your only real option. They support something similar to netflow but you will still need a server. This may be overkill.

You could try a third party firmware called gargoyle it is one of the few that can put caps on users and to a point monitor the data. You would at least know who did it if you would put a lower cap on each device and see which hits it first.

 

[marko55]

You could pony up for a more business-class firewall like a Fortigate that has proxy capabilities and on-box traffic monitoring and reporting. The proxy feature will actually cache some data that "can" save data usage but if its streaming that's killing you then that won't help. It would however give you some reporting on who and what is hogging your traffic. Sonicwall firewalls have decent on box reporting as well and can at least give you a top talker report. All these things can be found on ebay pretty cheap.