Internet providers are changing how we customers will be billed for using the internet. For years we’ve only had to pay a monthly fee and could use the web for as many hours as we liked.

Today though we are starting to face a restriction on how much data we actually use. Every time you visit a website or watch a video online you are using bandwidth (data), gold dust to the Internet providers.

Why you should monitor how much bandwidth you are using

With some ISP’s you’ll need to watch on how much bandwidth you use on a daily basis, more so for households that have multiple PC’s, Laptops and even games consoles all connecting to the web.

Virgin Media Broadband in the UK is one example of an ISP that places restrictions on users who over-use the web connections. Their traffic management page gives a run down about their heavy usage policy, basically how much data you can use.

I use their M (10MB) package and pay approx £35 a month. Between the hours of 10am – 3pm I can use 1500MB of data transfer, anything over that my connection gets capped to 75% slower than my normal speed. Between 4pm – 9pm I’m restricted when I reach 750MB and again, 75% slower than my normal speed. These restriction will last 5 hours.

Confused? I don’t blame you.

Customers are not used to dealing with data bandwidth but now it’s going to play a vitial role on how we pay for our internet connection. Don’t worry about having super fast broadband speeds; it’s now all about how much data we use and how much it will cost us.

How to see how much internet bandwidth you use

One piece of software that I use is called NetWorx, it’s free to download here.  This software will measure how much bandwidth a computer uses. You can export reports and merge them into a single excel sheet, giving a more overall picture of how much bandwidth your computers are using.

This screenshot shows my reports for daily usage broken up into a table and a graph at the bottom. I can change the reports into weekly, monthly and hour display or even create a custom one.

What about measuring bandwidth for the entire household?

Most home networks will have several devices all connected to the internet, from desktops & laptops to gaming consoles such as the PS3 & Xbox. If your internet router does not measure bandwidth coming in & out of your household, which is very likely, then you’ll probably need to purchase a device that can do exactly that.

I wonder how long it will take ISP’s to start selling “bandwidth monitoring services” just like web hosting companies.