I have a Nighthawk RAX54 modem and an older Surfboard SB6190 router.
Having the same issue. I have a Nighthawk RAX54 modem and an older Surfboard SB6190 router. I changed my plan with Xfinity from TV plus (which I rarely watched as I did 90% streaming) and internet to only a downgraded internet plan at the end of August 2023 based on my historical use and needs. I checked the historical data usage and averaged 800GBs/month. Interestingly, once I downgraded to just the internet plan (same data allowance of 1229GB/month as before), the data usage doubled. Same equipment, same data usage allowance, no additional hardware connected, no gamming, just downgraded the speed. I was expecting a bit more of usage than before based on the fact that I would be doing 100% streaming instead of ~90%. But this assessed 10% increase in streaming should not account for a 95% increase in data usage. According to Xfinity, last month I clocked almost 1117GB and this month I'm at 609GB and it's only the 10th of the month, so I'm expecting to exceed the allowed 1229GB/month and heading towards having to pay Xfinity $10 for every block of 50GB of additional data over the 1229GB. Of course I can upgrade my plan so I get more allowance but the interesting parts are:
1) my data usage pretty much doubled according to Xfinity with no justified reason other than I stopped paying them $185 per month for services I hardly used (which I had for two years) to just $50 for a plan the should've covered the data usage I need for a month (based on their own historical data prior to downgrading my plan).
2) My Netgear Nighthawk RAX54 modem shows half the usage in its 'Traffic Meter' report of what Xfinity started to show for September and now October...
Re: I have a Nighthawk RAX54 modem and an older Surfboard SB6190 router.
Just a tiny technical note:
Surfboard SB6190 is the cable modem, and
Nighthawk RAX54 is the WiFi router.
It is indeed frustrating that Netgear does not provide any method to report network usage by device, which would immediately identify "what's going on." This is the top request on Netgear's Idea Exchange since 2018:
@plemans has a good point that a sudden increase in data usage can be an indication of something running wild. In other words, "nothing changed" could mean "as far as I am aware or intended." Finding the device can be a nightmare.
2) My Netgear Nighthawk RAX54 router shows half the usage in its 'Traffic Meter' report of what Xfinity started to show for September and now October...
No matter which devices are using the network, the quantity of up/down data reported by the router should match the Xfinity report. Do they both start counting on the 1st of the month? Does Xfinity provide a convenient way to compare usage with the Traffic Meter report? (such as reporting "Yesterday")
I was just looking at the Traffic Meter report on my Netgear Orbi and find the numbers hard to accept. It says last month I uploaded just under 1GB/day and this month I am uploading 12GB per day! For the entire month of September, I downloaded 242GB, and through under 10 days of October it claims I have downloaded 980GB!
Alas, I cannot compare Netgear's Traffic Meter against Spectrum because Spectrum does not provide usage information.
