bandwidth notification - very high

[Simon]

Re (1), are you suggesting that you'd rather IDNet monitored all traffic?  Surely there are privacy issues surrounding this?

[karvala]

Re (1), are you suggesting that you'd rather IDNet monitored all traffic?  Surely there are privacy issues surrounding this?

Depends what you mean.  I'm not suggesting they monitor traffic *content*; as SimonM says, that would be illegal as well as a gross invasion of privacy.  I am suggest that they could monitor traffic *patterns*; this is what ISPs do when they traffic shape - they don't snoop on the contents, but an analysis of traffic patterns allows them to throttle some types of traffic even when directed to the HTTP port.  Of course we don't want any throttling or any other form of traffic shaping, but the same technology can be used to monitor and counter DDoS attacks before they reach the customer.  It takes money to implement, and if not used for traffic shaping I can understand why IDNet don't want to bother, but the flipside of that is that they should accept liability for the consequences of not having it.  At least, that's the argument I would make.  I think both sides could mount a reasonable case in practice.

[Steve]

If it became common unless I'm been too pessimistic you'd have no choice except to go unlimited or to an ISP that gave some guarantee of relative immunity to at least the cost implications of a sustained DDoS attack.

[tfw7]

Well I am pleased to say my new router seems to have done the trick - it's been on 24/7 since Fri pm now, and these are my stats:
Daily Bandwidth Breakdown 1 June 2013 to 3 June 2013
Day Download (GB) Upload (GB) Peak (GB)* Off-Peak (GB)*
1st 0.17 0.02 0.17 0.0
2nd 0.22 0.07 0.22 0.0
3rd 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Total:0.39 0.09 0.39 0.0

Back to my normal, light usage - yay!!

Once again I am hugely grateful to all those who proffered help - many thanks for all your fantastic suggestions. In the end a new router was the solution - the only slight frustration for me was not knowing quite why the old router started misbehaving. But hey ho, all now seems well. And the new router has a very accurate usage log which will make it really easy for me to check there are no future issues.

[andrue]

the only slight frustration for me was not knowing quite why the old router started misbehaving.

The joys of IT. At least when I'm debugging my code I nearly always get to the bottom of what it's doing. But the complexities of IT often leave me mystified 

[Glenn]

I once spent from 7pm - 4 am trying to get internet connection sharing working between 2 PC with my mate. They wouldn't have it despite reboots, threats of abuse etc, we gave up eventually and went to bed. Got up in the morning turned on the 2 pc's still the same, so started to make breakfast, then the modem started dialing "what have you change" I asked, no reply, my mate was in the loo. The modem connected and worked fine, that is until I tried to disconnect via the software, the only way to clear the line was to pull the plug. Never found out why it though.

[Technical Ben]

I once spent from 7pm - 4 am trying to get internet connection sharing working between 2 PC with my mate. They wouldn't have it despite reboots, threats of abuse etc, we gave up eventually and went to bed. Got up in the morning turned on the 2 pc's still the same, so started to make breakfast, then the modem started dialing "what have you change" I asked, no reply, my mate was in the loo. The modem connected and worked fine, that is until I tried to disconnect via the software, the only way to clear the line was to pull the plug. Never found out why it though.

Same here. No idea what was going on in 95 to XP pre SP1, but PCs would NOT link properly and it was like black magic getting them to work. I think it turned out to be 1 button/tick box hidden away and a reboot that fixed it. But I'd be darned if I ever found it a second time in all those years.

Come my Windows 7d ays, and even XP SP2/3 and it works fine (note I intentionally leave Vista out... but mainly cos I don't use it so don't know!).