2011-05-02

Tools to Track AT&T Gateway Usage

Janko Roettgers has a survey article on GigaOm today that asks AT&T customers whether they can see their usage using an AT&T website. About 45% (n=37) of those surveyed answered they are unable to see usage stats.

AT&T U-verse users can view their usage in their own Residential Gateway. The usage statistics page is at http://192.168.1.254./xslt?PAGE=C_1_0 - scroll down to the "Traffic Statistics" section.

The administrative control page (login required) permits resetting the stats. Reset the stats monthly, on the billing cycle day, to make it easy to track usage against AT&T billing.

Note these capabilities are found on a 2WIRE 3800-series gateway. Other AT&T routers, especially DSL boxes, have different equipment which may or may not have a statistics page.

For those who wish to monitor their stats on their RG, at this link are RG Statistics Logging Scripts and instructions to set up monitoring using a cron job.  The zip file contains installation instructions (Ubuntu/Debian Linux).  A small SQL script, also included, produces a usage report.

A sample report for data gathered since March 14 is below.

+------------+------------+-------------+---------+----------+--------+
| Day        | Sent/Recvd | Bytes       | GB      | Packets  | Errors |
+------------+------------+-------------+---------+----------+--------+
| 2011-04-14 | Receive    |   471170071 |  0.4712 |  1248297 |      0 |
| 2011-04-14 | Transmit   |   261420116 |  0.2614 |   564405 |      0 |
| 2011-04-14 |   Total    |   732590187 |  0.7326 |  1812702 |      0 |
| 2011-04-15 | Receive    |   770363944 |  0.7704 |  1006855 |      0 |
| 2011-04-15 | Transmit   |    71026822 |  0.0710 |   520748 |      0 |
| 2011-04-15 |   Total    |   841390766 |  0.8414 |  1527603 |      0 |
| 2011-04-16 | Receive    |   609502238 |  0.6095 |   722370 |      1 |
| 2011-04-16 | Transmit   |    57294972 |  0.0573 |   361775 |      0 |
| 2011-04-16 |   Total    |   666797210 |  0.6668 |  1084145 |      1 |
| 2011-04-17 | Receive    |   318645844 |  0.3186 |   291616 |      2 |
| 2011-04-17 | Transmit   |    39332970 |  0.0393 |   175203 |      0 |
| 2011-04-17 |   Total    |   357978814 |  0.3580 |   466819 |      2 |
| 2011-04-18 | Receive    |   299281224 |  0.2993 |   666078 |      0 |
| 2011-04-18 | Transmit   |    58786871 |  0.0588 |   353637 |      0 |
| 2011-04-18 |   Total    |   358068095 |  0.3581 |  1019715 |      0 |
| 2011-04-19 | Receive    |   886435986 |  0.8864 |  1560230 |      0 |
| 2011-04-19 | Transmit   |   711104440 |  0.7111 |   994422 |      0 |
| 2011-04-19 |   Total    |  1597540426 |  1.5975 |  2554652 |      0 |
| 2011-04-20 | Receive    |   699685659 |  0.6997 |   637560 |      0 |
| 2011-04-20 | Transmit   |    56879398 |  0.0569 |   337293 |      0 |
| 2011-04-20 |   Total    |   756565057 |  0.7566 |   974853 |      0 |
| 2011-04-21 | Receive    |   455349013 |  0.4553 |   602567 |      1 |
| 2011-04-21 | Transmit   |    86789917 |  0.0868 |   324296 |      0 |
| 2011-04-21 |   Total    |   542138930 |  0.5421 |   926863 |      1 |
| 2011-04-22 | Receive    |   440903082 |  0.4409 |   770886 |      0 |
| 2011-04-22 | Transmit   |    61319206 |  0.0613 |   396483 |      0 |
| 2011-04-22 |   Total    |   502222288 |  0.5022 |  1167369 |      0 |
| 2011-04-23 | Receive    |   128387865 |  0.1284 |   202243 |      0 |
| 2011-04-23 | Transmit   |    32450548 |  0.0325 |   115669 |      0 |
| 2011-04-23 |   Total    |   160838413 |  0.1608 |   317912 |      0 |
| 2011-04-24 | Receive    |   357397478 |  0.3574 |   391484 |      0 |
| 2011-04-24 | Transmit   |    45117822 |  0.0451 |   224438 |      0 |
| 2011-04-24 |   Total    |   402515300 |  0.4025 |   615922 |      0 |
| 2011-04-25 | Receive    |   460476990 |  0.4605 |   508043 |      0 |
| 2011-04-25 | Transmit   |    64078588 |  0.0641 |   302462 |      0 |
| 2011-04-25 |   Total    |   524555578 |  0.5246 |   810505 |      0 |
| 2011-04-26 | Receive    |   868455813 |  0.8685 |   910591 |      0 |
| 2011-04-26 | Transmit   |    74527520 |  0.0745 |   460094 |      0 |
| 2011-04-26 |   Total    |   942983333 |  0.9430 |  1370685 |      0 |
| 2011-04-27 | Receive    |   286835580 |  0.2868 |   348551 |      0 |
| 2011-04-27 | Transmit   |    48691431 |  0.0487 |   206843 |      0 |
| 2011-04-27 |   Total    |   335527011 |  0.3355 |   555394 |      0 |
| 2011-04-28 | Receive    |   759490405 |  0.7595 |   771587 |      0 |
| 2011-04-28 | Transmit   |    64131207 |  0.0641 |   390037 |      0 |
| 2011-04-28 |   Total    |   823621612 |  0.8236 |  1161624 |      0 |
| 2011-04-29 | Receive    |  1855420924 |  1.8554 |  2576866 |      1 |
| 2011-04-29 | Transmit   |   417368072 |  0.4174 |  1150840 |      0 |
| 2011-04-29 |   Total    |  2272788996 |  2.2728 |  3727706 |      1 |
| 2011-04-30 | Receive    |  2854764859 |  2.8548 |  2329114 |      0 |
| 2011-04-30 | Transmit   |   140898052 |  0.1409 |  1331942 |      0 |
| 2011-04-30 |   Total    |  2995662911 |  2.9957 |  3661056 |      0 |
| 2011-05-01 | Receive    |   583554982 |  0.5836 |   646801 |      0 |
| 2011-05-01 | Transmit   |    47077335 |  0.0471 |   293666 |      0 |
| 2011-05-01 |   Total    |   630632317 |  0.6306 |   940467 |      0 |
| 2011-05-02 | Receive    |     1536599 |  0.0015 |      733 |      0 |
| 2011-05-02 | Transmit   |      920571 |  0.0009 |      755 |      0 |
| 2011-05-02 |   Total    |     2457170 |  0.0025 |     1488 |      0 |
| NULL       |   Total    | 15446874414 | 15.4469 | 24697480 |      5 |
+------------+------------+-------------+---------+----------+--------+

For the last few months, usage on this RG has ranged between 85 and 150 GB/month. Usage reflects heavy net surfing. Netflix / Amazon / YouTube video consumption is about 1 to 2 hours daily.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Perfect timing! One friend was just looking for something like this. I'll tell him about this. Thanks for this one.

http://matrixresourcesinc.blogspot.com/

Noony said...

I tried this procedure and have found that usage statistics are being gathered. I'm also seeing that when the DVR (which is connected to the RG by CAT5) is recording or if one of the wireless receivers on another TV is turned on, usage goes up. So is there a way to seperate actual Internet usage from TV and phone usage?

Karl Geiger said...

Noony --

Not in this iteration. It just meters the byte count to see whether the limit is being approached.

To tease-out the traffic counts for high-use devices like the Uverse DVR, consider assigning them to distinct ethernet ports. The RG tracks bytes in/out per port. See them on "Settings" tab > "LAN" tab > "Status", then scroll down to "Traffic Statistics". On this model RG, the direct URL is http://192.168.1.254/xslt?PAGE=C_2_0.

The software is getting long in the tooth. Perhaps in the next revision.

Thanks!

:KG