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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 would be awesome if you could use something like Packetbeat.
Yes, Google WiFi and Ubiquity do this and it would be really helpful to have this feature on the Orbi too. Below is an example of Google Wifi.
- I had the same issue last month. See my recent (separate) post for my issue and how I had to solve it. Long story short, Orbi didn't help me. Had to find a separate monitor/solution. I completely agree that Orbi should have this built in.
The path I took was much more difficult, but I'll outline it here in case anyone would care to do the same.
1. I bought a smart switch that allows monitor ports. I put this between my XFinity router and the Orbi. I set up the mirror port to go into a server that I have.
2. I set up Packetbeat, Elasticsearch, and Kibana on that server. These are reasonably easy to install. If you use Ubuntu/Debian flavors of Linux, you can even install with simple "apt-get"s.
3. I ran analytics on the traffic. I was not familiar with how to build queries in Kibana, so this process took a few days before I had charts that represented what I was looking for.
Your 4) already exists. Go to the debug page (change IP if necessary; and it works for both the router and satellite) and enable "WAN Port mirror to LAN port1". There's also a PCAP built-in, which can be either saved to the system memory or a USB device, also enabled from the debug settings.
5) could probably be done on a Rasberry Pi or something similar I'd think.
Agree. Bandwidth monitoring per device is extremely useful. Other devices offer this. Please implement this.
Agreed, this should be standard. Especially if you are going to have a web interface to the router, let us see and control everything...
I'm also going over on usage for two months now with Xfinity and nothing has changed in the last 2 years here. There has to be a way to see who is eating the data for the amount of money I paid for this device. I can't believe the free router had this and the expensive one doesn't... Just sad. Please fix this quickly!
Like others, I find it very frustrating to not be able to monitor usage by device through ORBI.
Comcast is telling me we are exceeding the terrabyte data plan, so soon I'll be charged $10/50gig. Our usage has spiked in the last two months but we have no idea what is caushing the spike and with so many devices to turn on and off, it is not feasible to isolate the problem.
Comcast is offerring new house networking products (xpods??) , so maybe we'll switch to this...but it is irritating to have had an ORBI for only 12-18 months only to not be able to track this problem - and basically render it useless. This is really poor design on ORBI's part. There are many posts on this topic, you would think the engineers would have dealt with it already. At this point, I've tried two Netgear products and while initially happy with the ORBI, this is ending badly. I'm not sure I'll purchase Netgear products again in the future.
Yes, please add this. I have roommates that I need to monitor bandwith for since I have Data Caps with my ISP.
