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I've been searching the forums and the Internet in general, today, as I have gotten my first notice from Comcast that, lo, I am over my 1 Terabyte limit, this month. It has been inching toward that mark for a bit, and last month was around 944 Gig. What can I say: We are a connected, gaming, streaming family and our Comcast link is a vital utility. I have seen suggestions on this forum to "just disconnect everything and reconnect until you find the hog." With 30ish devices on the network, 4 kids, 2 renters, and countless visitors, this is simply not a possibility. What I could do is set up a different router (preferably one with this feature) and move the connections over to it one-by-one until I find the offender. If I have to go that route, I highly doubt the Orbi would get reconnected. Which is a shame because it is a pretty decent solution for everything else.
I would like for Netgear to seriously consider giving customers an option for this data. There are many ways to do it, but ANY of them would be acceptable to me. I'm a long-time networking pro, so even if these are scary for some people, at least it would be an option.
- Do the metering in the device with display of the statistics in the interface and in the app. This is obviously going to make the most customers happy because it would give us a report per-device of the usage. This isn't rocket science: Even if the device has a database limitation of 100 devices to monitor, or even 50, it would be useful. COMCAST does it on their modem devices for xFi. It can't be that hard.
- Do the metering externally by providing SNMP statistics on a per-device basis for smaller timeframes. This would mean that the Orbi doesn't have to store "dead" devices forever and would be up to whatever stat-gathering tool was used.
- Do the metering externally by providing some app that collects the data to a desktop. Maybe Java so you can hit Windows, Linux, and Mac all at once with it.
- Provide traffic mirroring to a selected wired port. This would at least give me the ability to plug in Wireshark or other tools to see what is going on. It would be super useful for troubleshooting intermittent issues and not just bandwidth monitoring.
- Provide netflow/sflow output to a collector on the home network. This would also have broader uses than just bandwidth monitoring, but it is potentially the hardest to use solution in this list. If it is easy to implement in the Orbi (i.e., the chips already support it), then I'll take it happily.
- Other things I haven't mentioned. Look, I'm desperate, here. I will find a way to use anything that helps.
I get 2 months free "warnings" from Comcast, but the cost of not knowing this outweighs replacing the Orbi. Once I start getting charged $10/50 Gig, I'm going to need to know right then and there. And if I don't have a reasonable answer by that time, another Orbi will be going out to eBay.
195 Comments
It is very possible on home routers. I dumped Orbi and got 4 piece google wifi. Stable as a rock with lots of features Orbi doesn't provide.
Yes this is a home router and not a business router, but you have to realize a few things.
1. We don’t have a business level of devices connected, and if that was an issue they could say they support a certain number of connected devices.
2. This isn’t a low-end home router, this is pretty much top-tier. I feel like anything higher than this price would be business level. We pay a lot of money for these Orbi systems.
3. If you do your research, device bandwidth monitoring is a standard feature for competitors in this price-range and market. As the last person mentioned, google mesh has this feature and I know others do as well.
Honestly, the biggest thing for me on this point is that we haven’t heard anything from Netgear on this. With a comment board this long wouldn’t there be some notice by the forum managers and some word from them on if they think this is a valid feature? If this really is something so CPU taxing that it would never be possible, why haven’t they told us that so we can stop asking about it and move on with our lives?
I guess I’m just confused on how they can care about their customers and stay this quiet at the same time.
Wow - this request is over a year old and no feedback?
Looks like Google Wifi here I come. . .
Why hasn't Netgear done a THING about this? Most (all?) of the competition supports it, and it's been a popular/hot feature request. Don't tell me it's a hardware limitation either. No acknowledgment, no thanks for the feedback - nothing. As good as I enjoyed the initial experience, Netgear is about to lose me and my family to a different company that is a bit more consumer-focused. Shame...
This may be done to push us to use the circle app and pay for its subscription.
+1. Shocked that this is not there!
+1...need to know who are my data hogs...
- Please add data bandwidth per device feature. I just had to add my r7000 in between Orbi and the modem to find out which device was hogging data.
I am very dissapointed this feature is not in my new Orbi RBK53. Even my old, cheap TP-Link router was able to do this. Like many others, this feature would be hugely beneficial to diagnose Xfinity data usage by device.
