Wifi Activity Last Week
Wifi Activity Last Month
One of our ongoing projects here at Myrtle Street Labs is to supply an open wifi access point to the local neighborhood. We have an outdoor rated access point with a 9db antenna mounted on our roof. It’s up pretty high so the signal is strong for a wide area. The open wifi is firewalled off from the rest of our internal network (including our internal WEP-protected wifi) so we don’t have to worry about some over-curious geek poking around on our systems here.
Above you see usage graphs generated by MRTG. The green area is downstream usage, and the blue line shows upstream usage. The graph on the top is the last week of activity (newer data is on the left, strip-chart style). The values are 30-minute averages of bandwidth usage. The graph on the bottom shows roughly the past month of activity, wth one-hour averages of usage. So far the typical daily usage pattern is moderate use during the day, then heavier usage at night. In general I appreciate my neighbors generally saving their bittorrent usage to nighttime.
Starting last Saturday night somebody started a HEAVY download, sustaining more downstream bandwidth than I thought was possible. This is visble as the large green area towards the left side of both graphs. When I noticed this I considered cutting them off, but it didn’t seem to be impacting my usage at all. I was working at home on Tuesday, and I was listening to Pandora, visiting websites, using ssh to my computer at work and my VoIP telephone with no apparent impact on my service. So apparently my ISP has a pretty fat pipe.
This continued almost continuously until Tuesday afternoon. This was around the same time I noticed Comcast hooking up my new neighbors across the street. Now I’m pretty sure I know who was downloading so much data.
You’re welcome.
(current Myrtle Street Open Wifi usage data can be found at http://zaphod.dyndns.org/mrtg).
Wow, who is your ISP? Do you use QoS to segregate the neighbor traffic and dedicate bandwidth to your home network? At our place, the wimpy 1.1 MB SDSL can’t support a voip call simultaneously with bittorrent or RDP.
My ISP shall remain nameless. I have plans to implement QoS, but I haven’t worked out all the details yet (the commands are fiddly!). Once I sort that out I’m going to post a howto. My existing routing rules mean that my internal network and the external network are roughly balanced, which also helps.
I measured about 6 megabit down last night, which explains why the traffic didn’t impact me.
>”…Listening to Pandora, visiting websites, using ssh to my computer at work and my VoIP telephone…”
So, you were watching porn?