Overloading on a single Wi Fi router causes reduction of network speed, may necessitate tracking individual devices. It is important to track the data usage so the efficiency and performance of internet stays in excellent shape.
Track Bandwidth and Data Usage on Router
Since all network devices are connected to network through the router, this becomes the single point of monitoring. Though Monitoring is a difficult task because home routers are not capable of providing individual device consumption. Router firmware provide the device consumption. Monitoring over longer duration is a tedious job.
The ‘My Page’ add-on for DD-WRT with additional storage may do well and continues to login in for longer durations. Buffalo offers routers with preinstalled DD-WRT. Gargoyle, an openWRT router firmware is meant for monitoring network devices. It can also allot quotas to devices for a better control.
The wrtbwmon script is there for routers running Linux based firmware like DD-WRT and Tomato. It needs a separate database for it to connect to the network.
OpenWRT users may use luci-wrtmon for making it a simpler activity.
Track all the Individual Devices connected through a router
No tool can start monitoring devices without the help of the router :
All the information needs to be captured on the router itself. In absence of any information not being captured on the router, one must rely on the inbuilt tools of each device in use.
Since there are so many devices like Windows PC, MAC, Android etc. connected to the network, this makes it more difficult. Many devices may not use data on the home network at all, rendering data usage meter ineffective. As some data may have been downloaded elsewhere on a different network.
Different tools may be used for different operating systems:
GlassWire is a free network monitoring tool that effectively tracks all versions of Windows for Windows 8 and 10 a specific metered connection can be set and Windows can track data usage for it.
MAC can download Bandwidth + from the MAC app store use it for the purpose. If bulk of bandwidth is being used by only a few devices, you can find out the ones using more data.
# The built in data usage
The monitor does monitor Wi Fi data usage but not for any specific network. iPhones and iPads can only monitor cellular data use. Third party apps may be required to monitor data usage in Wi Fi.
The router is the only alternative for getting a full picture of data usage. If one cannot do that then installing some of these tools on devices will help. A few devices like game consoles and those streaming media from internet do not allow to install apps for monitoring.
But if it is really very important to get the monitoring data, the only one option is setting up a router with a custom router firmware.And use a tool for bandwidth monitoring and data usage logging tool.
