Hi there, My router is a brand called "RV Wifi" running openWrt which is using a cellular sim card to connect to the internet. i also have a home assistant LAN which connects to the router for internet access. I have high data usage which i'm trying to narrow down. However i'm a newbie to this so struggling to get my head around the below simple question.
In the below picture does the WAN Rx value mean that it's used 28.71GB of cellular internet data or is that figure including local data so not necessarily all of its internet data ?
Should be the internet traffic only, but keep in mind that different entities have different ideas about what they account as traffic, especially in regards to the per-packet-overhead... I would expect this number to correlate well with your ISP's counters (it is very likely that your ISP has some traffic counters that you can access) but not being identical. Might make sense to compare these numbers a few times over the course of an accounting period (month?) to figure out which is bigger. If my intuition is correct and there are differences in accounted overhead, the actual difference will depend on the packet size distribution of your traffic and there will not exis a simple single proportionality factor to convert the two values into each other (the smaller the average packet size the larger the difference in counters). If you know the accounted overhead for both ISP and OpenWrt you can get a better estimate by dividing the OpenWrt traffic volume (per direction) by the reported number of packets to get the average packet size, subtract the OpenWrt overhead, add the ISP accounted-overhead and re-multiply with the number of packets, but there are two unknowns in this (also, when going that route you need to keep in mind that the traffic/packet counters in OpenWrt will wrap around when they exceed the size of the variable they are accumulated in and that they are reset to zero on any reboot).
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately for some stupid reason my ISP wont allow me to see my data usage if the sim is in a router. I can however take the sim out and put it in my phone and then get a usage data display but just a pain in the ass cause sim is wrong size for my phone + doing that frequently is also a pain but not impossible.
My pre paid internet plan is 60gb per month and i seem to go through that in 2 weeks consistently so was just trying to narrow it down. By the sounds of it ..... Knowing that the WAN rx value is likely to be my internet data and not local data as well then i can start disconnecting some smart switches etc and see when the data usage goes down. I'm picking its google mini personally.
i suggesting you to use an accounting service on your router (openwrt) to manage and monitor clients (home assistant) traffics
well there is a package called ipfm which can monitor bandwidth per source ip address but i dont think its available for openwrt
but you can still use YAMon under openwrt (to many features but not user friendly and i think needs usb flash drive)
and another cool package called wrtbwmon (web based luci monitor)
Fair enough, then maybe take a few samples for a test month, to convince yourself how well OpenWrt's WAN RX and TX counters match your ISP's numbers, and then use that knowledge to interpret the OpenWrt numbers in the future?
@khokooli advice seems decent to figure out which devices cause the unexpected traffic. One additional option, that should be easy to install is nlbwmon (opkg update ; opkg install luci-app-nlbwmon should do the trick and pull in all dependencies)
I think if I had this issue I'd start by putting all the internet of things devices into their own VLAN. then I'd firewall that entire VLAN from accessing the internet. Then if necessary I'd poke holes in that firewall for specific devices to get small bandwidth connections during certain times of day. Like your home mini gets 300Kbps from 6am to 9pm or maybe just smaller windows when you're around, like 6am to 9am and 6pm to 9pm
good tip thanks. I'll look into that. Ive seen vlan mentioned a few times for various things so I'll do some reading. I've been travelling australia in a caravan for over 3 years and dont always get internet so that would make those numbers even worse sometimes.
(also, when going that route you need to keep in mind that the traffic/packet counters in OpenWrt will wrap around when they exceed the size of the variable they are accumulated in and that they are reset to zero on any reboot).