NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Installed Orbi and data usage quadrupled!
I purchased and installed an RBR50 AC5000 with a Satellite RBS50 on July 5. It worked great. I had much more coverage for our house/property and all our devices were able to connect from everywhere a...
Have you tried to use the XFi app. It requires a lot of setup since you have identify all or most of the devices that are using your Xfinity connection. It works for wired and wireless connections, although they imply only wireless. But since I've assigned all my devices, I can tell that my security cams take up about 47% of my total bandwidth, one daughter about 10%, son about 15%, my own usage about 12%, and all others the remainder. I did go over my cap for couple months, and monitor this closely. There's supposedly an unlimited option from Comcast for $50 a month, but that's not the solution you should seek, IMHO.
Are you sure you weren't hacked in the sense that someone is camping on your network, downloading stuff by being in the vicinity? Or like others pointed out, some new device going crazy with erroneous usage. I don't think Wi-Fi calling can be that much... but maybe something that's trying to cache the internet by predicting your needs? What about web browsers left open with YouTube running on automatic play next?
I was just about to consider Circle so that gives me pause if it creates traffic on it's own...
I've now turned off wifi calling on all our iphones and disabled Circle (I didn't find the free version to be that useful anyway). I don't have an Xfinity branded modem (I hate paying the monthly rental fees) so I don't think the XFi app will work for me given I'm not using one of their gateway routers. I don't have any security cameras running either. I've got my network locked down pretty well, and I don't suspect outsiders (the one thing I liked about Circle is it notified me of every new device as it connected to the network. I knew them all). Maybe this month was a complete fluke, but I find that hard to believe. I guess I'll try flashing my old router with a firmware that allows for device usage monitoring and swap out my Orbi for a month. That should tell me if it was any one device. If usage goes back to normal, I suppose that points back to the Orbi itself as the culprit...
Not sure this will help anyone, but I might as well share my solution. I did end up flashing an old netgear router with the opensource firmware DD-WRT and then ran the very helpful YAMon script for a couple weeks. My Orbi was offline that whole time as I ran everything back through the old router. Turns out I was able to immediately isolate the traffic to one of my laptops and once I dug into that laptop found a rogue backgound process running. The backgroud process "calendaragent" was out of control and downloading dozen's of GB of data per day. I killed that and rebuilt the online shared calendars and it's been ok since. I've since put my Orbi back online and things seem back to normal (this month's data usage is back in line with all my previous months). I did change a few things on the Orbi when bringing it back online like I turned off wifi calling for our phones and I disabled Circle (while a neat tool, it really wasn't that helpful). I still wish Orbi's firmware supported network traffic monitoring at a device level. That would be VERY useful for tracking down similar occurences in the future. In retrospect, I should have started with the computers on my network and just run something simple like Activity Monitor to view the network traffic. I'd have easily seen the rogue process there and would have saved a lot of headache.