‘There may be delays in reporting and processing usage records; additional delays may occur due to technical difficulties. During the time your invoice is being processed, you may not be able to view your usage or you may experience additional delays in reporting of usage. This usage information is only an estimate, your next invoice will be determined by the information contained in our billing system.’

So, you can’t actually see what is accounted for in the billing system. I went over my 20 gig limit one month and had to pay extra even though this monitor shows me as never having gone near that 20 gig limit.

Let’s hope the monitors that the major ISPs in the lower 48 come up with are better than what we have here in Alaska. We’re screwed because our cable company is the only game in town if you want anything above the 768 MB d/l speed that the DSL here offers. I had no idea I’d be paying almost $80/month for 3MB download speed when I moved here. It makes me long for Comcast, and that’s just wrong on so many levels.

@Stacey – Device-specific data monitoring is becoming more of a reality from a protocol perspective as well. Although we’ve been hearing about IPv6 for years without any game-changing action, IP-addresses in IPv6 are 128bit vs IPv4′s 32 bits. This allows for device-level identification directly in the IP address.

http://bit.ly/3YnabB

What about all the advertising in sites? I’m thinking the ad blocker plugins just prevent the ads from showing on your screen rather than actually blocking the ads from downloading.

The duopolies seem intent on killing the internet either by a lack of net neutrality or by caps.

When and if the caps arrive are the ISP’s going to include their offerings in the cap too? Will the ISP’s be able to circumvent any net neutrality by offering those that can afford the “protection money” to keep their sites off the meter???

Second off the bandwidth being reported by any such meter may or may not be your bandwidth use. There is background traffic that is constantly hitting any router from hacker scans to left over connection attempts from the prior owner of an IP. P2P traffic is a perfect example where let’s say you were sharing files from your IP, stopped then your IP changes there would still be packets trying to get to your old IP which would be counted as some other customers bandwidth. Lastly unless these ISP start to filter the junk such as pop ups and SPAM they would be no better than you going to buy a gallon of gas and getting half a gallon of water instead. SPAM is not “my” bandwidth and with some of these guys not taking any steps to reduce it how on earth can they turn around and charge the end user for it.

Yeah sure SPAM, random packets here and random packets there don’t amount ot much but that’s not the point. The ISP is wanting to measure “your” use of the Internet then they will legally be bound to show it was “your” use.