Monitoring Tenants Bandwidth Usage

[jlct021]

Hi

I have just moved into a new place.

My new landlady said I may use her WIFI provided I find a simple way for her to monitor exactly how much bandwidth I draw each month.

Her ISP is MWEB.

Any ideas as to what the Simplest most Accurate and Cost Effective Solution for the above scenario would be?

I feel it a waste of resources to have telkom install another ADSL line given there is already one upstairs.

Thanks in advance.

 

[kissingmybbgoodbye]

Why not get your own isp account and use that over her adsl.

 

[psichron]

Half-bridge

Put the router in half-bridge mode. Then you can just dial into your own ADSL account from your PC with PPPoE and not use any of her cap, only your own. Lots of posts on here about how to do that.

 

[Pada]

The problem with half-bridge mode would be that you can still use her account. The best would be to let her setup the router in bridge mode to avoid that situation, but then she unfortunately has to dial a PPPoE connection from her PC too! The other problem with setting the router in bridge mode, would be that the router's firewall is going to be disabled for all purposes, so you need to have your Windows firewall enabled and well configured. If the router is in half-bridge mode, then she won't have any firewall issues, but you would since you're going to dial a PPPoE connection.
If she trusts you, you can setup the router in half-bridge mode if the router supports it.

You can always run NetLimiter 2 Monitor on both your PC and her PC. It is fairly accurate, free and it provides per application traffic usage. The only problem with it would be that you can reset your traffic usage of NetLimiter. Most other bandwidth/traffic usage software has the same problem: that you can reset the usage logs. NetLimiter 2 Pro allows you to control the application via remote networking and also has the option to deny access to the client to modify/reset the settings, which you can consider in your case. Unfortunately its $30 for the pro version.

Alternatively you could create a WiFi hotspot. I don't know much about them, but I do reckon that most of them can keep track of the bandwidth usage. My Wireless broadband router (Linksys WRT54GL) that I have with DD-WRT 3rd-party firmware has Hotspot firmware installed on it