Time Warner capping internet access, charging more

My Live connection has always been three or four green bars in CoD4 unless I was running a download manager or torrent on the network, but like I said, the past two weeks I have noticed that my connection will drop to kilobytes per second for prolonged periods whenever I'm running a high load. It's not just with Live, so I know that it's my provider.

 

Not a dumb question!

It's hard to see, the provider should show you that on their side through some sort of web site with a login so you can see your stats like looking at your cell minutes with your cell provider.
Of course, the same thing should be available (and ideally more reliably) through your own gear, but I don't know of a router that maintains these stats (at least not typical home routers, corporate routers do maintain rich statistics). But I'm not an expert in this area, there may very well be some that do (in particular the hacked Linksys WRT54G that is so popularly loaded with custom Linux software so some nerd on the net has probably made a version that includes this kind of feature).

 

After this all started I found this site (software) that supposidely can tell you how much your downloading in a time period.

http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/broadband-download-monitor.html

 

Great if you have one device.
If you have an XBox, a Wii, multiple PC's, a Mac, laptops from work that connect occasionally, an iPhone doing wireless, etc., all of those will consume bandwidth too and make that tool wildly inaccurate.

You need something at the router/cable modem to be accurate.

 

... and however many neighbors are logged in

 

Ain't that the truth.

 

Streaming video via a Slingbox would probably run up the total a lot too...

 

or the Cafe