Thumb On the Scale? Study Finds 5 of 7 Broadband Meters Inaccurate

stox writes "For the 64 percent of Americans whose internet service provider imposes a broadband cap, and for those lucky enough to have a meter, I have some bad news. The president of the firm who audits many of the country's broadband meters says that he can't certify the measurements produced by five out of seven of his clients' meters because they don't count your bits correctly

Comments

Router with DD-WRT firmware.

[Anonymous Coward]

DD-WRT has a meter I find it to be very accurate. I guess it could be used as evidence if things do not match.

Comcast used to be close

[jtownatpunk.net]

When they were enforcing the 250 gig cap, they were within 1% of my dd-wrt tally. Now that they're not enforcing the cap, their reading is waaaaaay under my actual usage. I wonder if they're no longer counting traffic that stays in the Comcast network.

Re:Comcast used to be close

[pancake_lover]

I recall that Comcast does not count some streaming video services against the data caps. There were some (like Netflix) who complained this was not in the spirit of net neutrality. So maybe they are still not counting some of the video you stream, depending on where you are streaming it from? Just a guess.

Here's some more info on this: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/net-neutrality-concerns-raised-about-comcasts-xbox-on-demand-service/.

So...

[CanHasDIY]

So this means that they can't legally do 'metered billing,' as the meter is known and proven to be inaccurate, right?

right?

anybody?

rrdtool & /proc/net/dev

[Janek Kozicki]

is it really so hard to

DATA1=`grep eth0 /proc/net/dev | sed -e 's/ /:/g' -e 's/:\+/:/g' | cut -d: -f 3,11`
rrdtool update /path/rrd/eth.rrd N:${DATA1}

?

What bytes are we measuring?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I don't know how many on slashdot know networking, but there are different ways of measuring bandwidth. Are we measuring layer 2, or layer 3? Further, layer 2 can often have multiple encapsulations before even taking layer 3 into consideration. Take for example DSL which frequently uses PPPoE, which means we have both PPP and Ethernet frames in addition to the IP data and everything encapsulated therein. And if you include DSL interleaving, then do we also include the packets that had a bad checksum and were therefore discarded? (in many cases there are a lot of these) That *is* data usage by all definitions. Do we also include ingress packets that were dropped due to bad checksums? Again, that is data usage.

In my opinion, the problem is that there aren't any standards defined for measuring bandwidth. Also in my opinion, that definition should be layer 3 traffic only and nothing else.