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Almost Symmetric Bandwidth Usage

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fastoy

Occasional Visitor
I have a perplexing question. My son-in-law has an Asus RT-AC68U running 3.0.0.4.376_3626 and uses a Motorola SURFboard SB6141 modem. I have an Asus RT-N65R running 3.0.0.4.376.3754 and use a Cisco DPC3008 modem. Both of us use Comcast as an ISP in the same metropolitan area of Memphis, TN.

I track the bandwidth utilization using the Asus router's Traffic Monitor "Daily" screen. I capture this day by day and input it into a spreadsheet. Monthly I compare this to Comcast's reported bandwidth.

The anomaly I see is that my son-in-law's "Transmission" bandwidth seems to track his "Reception" bandwidth. For example when he used 18.28 GB download he used 17.72 GB upload. Obviously there are variations on this but broadly this holds true. Generally his upload bandwidth TRACKS his download bandwidth lagging a couple of percent behind. It's like something is echoing downloaded packets back upstream.

This is very obvious when you look at a day-by-day chart of bandwidth utilization based on the Traffic Monitor Daily data. The spikes in this chart are high Netflix utilization by my granddaughter but the pattern is exhibited every day.

cIGDQRf.png


Notice how the upstream bandwidth is usually just a little below his download bandwidth. He is not running torrents or any other kind of file sharing application.

This pheonomen doesn't hold true for my router/modem combination. I chose a month where there was a day (02/21/15) when my granddaughter was at my house watching Netflix. Observe that the bandwidth is asymetric as expected.

d3YTXot.png


The first couple of days in the month are when I was doing CrashPlan backups.

My granddaughter is watching Netflix on a TiVo (but the same at my house). Wonder if there's a setting on his TiVo Netflix app that's causing some verification?

I'm not stuck on it being just Netflix. That may just be what makes the usage jump where the upstream is noticeable.

If I look at the actual #s for his bandwidth, on the days where he exceeds 10GB download his upload/download ratio is .85 compared to .70 on the days where he is less than 10GB download.

This compares to the actual #s for my bandwidth (excluding the CrashPlan days) of .31.

Is there a setting/configuration that would cause this? Is there some network setting that causes packets to be echoed? He is not running torrents nor any kind of P2P software.
 
The bandwidth monitor is buggy at best at times.

That or somebody else in his house is using his service to torrent without his knowledge.
 
He's probably torrenting and lying about it or the bandwidth monitor isn't working correctly.
I looked at the bandwidth that Comcast is reporting and now I'm doubting the upload bandwidth as reported by the Asus RT-AC68U.

Thanks!
 
Last edited:

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