What's eating my bandwidth?
If your computer uses a lot of bandwidth (network capacity) you may go over the ResNet fair usage policy. It can be difficult to understand what uses up all your bandwidth - especially if your computer is doing things in the background without you realising. This page should help.
What causes heavy usage
Streaming video and audio
Watching video or listening to audio online can use up a lot of bandwidth. Video requires much more than audio, but some people listen to radio stations all day long, and that adds up.
If you have the choice between different bitrates, try choosing the lower bandwidth option. For example, choose the Standard definition option instead of high definition on BBC iPlayer.
Sites such as YouTube are quite bandwidth heavy, but the video clips are short, and you tend to search, browse and view YouTube over time, rather than sit down to watch hours of it - so don't worry that a bit of YouTube will use up your allowance.
TV and video on demand
Video files, even if just downloaded or streamed, use up a lot of bandwidth, just as video files are pretty large.
Some video on demand and TV services - including Sky Anytime, 4oD, and Veoh - use peer to peer techniques to distribute the content. This is sometimes known as peercasting. It saves the broadcast capacity and money by getting each viewer to also act as a host. However your bandwidth usage goes up even further, because as well as receiving the file your computer is sending it out as well.
Large files hosted on Rapidshare and similar sites
Each file on Rapidshare can be up to 100MB in size - so ten files downloaded is 1 gigabyte.
If you are producing large files, consider Fluff (below) instead.
Filesharing
Peer to peer filesharing systems (eg BitTorrent, eMule, DC++, LimeWire, etc) can use a great deal of bandwidth. As well as you receiving the file your computer is sending it out - often many times over.
Other peer to peer mechanisms
Other software can use peer to peer mechanisms. For example, World of Warcraft uses p2p to distribute updates.
What doesn't cause heavy usage
Freewire TV
Freewire TV on ResNet is now available. It uses a system called IP Multicast which means that there is only one copy of the video stream for everyone on ResNet, no matter how many people are watching the channel - so it is very efficient.
Skype
We've never seen a case of really heavy usage on ResNet due to Skype. Skype uses about 30-70 kbit/sec when you are making a call. Unless your calls last for many hours this isn't significant.
Skype uses less when running in the background without a call - unless your Skype system is operating as a supernode. A supernode is a Skype system which is routing calls for other Skype users on the Internet. On ResNet however, our incoming firewall appears to stop computers on ResNet acting as supernodes.
Tips to reduce usage
- Turn your computer off when not in use
- Fully exit applications when you aren't using them
- Restrict how much bandwidth an application can use, especially for uploads
Turn your computer off when not in use
This is the simplest and most effective answer. If you aren't using the computer, turn it off. There is then absolutely no chance that it will be using bandwidth :-) It will also save electricity so it's good for the environment too.
Fully exit p2p and other heavy applications when you aren't using them
Many applications, especially p2p apps, don't exit when you click the Close button. Instead they disappear down to the system tray (bottom right corner by the clock) and continue running in the background there. They are still using bandwidth, uploading and downloading files.
To properly exit the application, typically you have to click the right-hand mouse button on the icon in the system tray and choose Exit.
Always fully exit your p2p applications when you have finished downloading files, or your uploads will continue and use up your bandwidth allowance.
Restrict how much bandwidth a p2p application can use
Most p2p applications have a feature to limit upload and download traffic to a certain level. Use them! This is particularly important for upload traffic, as you get no direct benefit from upload traffic, and uploads will run indefinitely as long as the application is open. For example, with the popular BitTorrent client utorrent see setting upload and download caps.
There are some tools which can limit bandwidth for any other application (even if they don't have bandwidth limiting built-in). We haven't tested these applications however, and they have to be installed at a very low level within the Windows kernel, which can make your system less stable - so use if at all with caution.