How much data do WOW and Skype Chat use per hour?

[jsmagic]

I have a highspeed internet connection in my home. my nephew uses it to play WOW while chatting with his friends over skype. he was playing approximately 8 hours a day, sometimes more. this month i have been advised that we used more than 419 gigs of data. is this data usage so high due to skype and wow? approximately how much data would he use every day doing this as this looks like it is going to cost me big time by AT&T? please reply to jan@jsmagic.net

 

[evilgenius134]

Skype and WoW will NOT use anywhere near that level. Even with extreme usage I can rarely see those use more than 2-5GB a month. 419GB suggests you are watching and downloading a lot of movies, TV shows and games.

 

[jaguarskx]

Skype shouldn't be using much bandwidth unless your nephew is making video calls.

As suggested above, are you watching an excessive amount of streaming movies online such as through NetFlix? I'm guessing an average 2 hour movie would probably be about 1.5GB - 2.0GB at most.

Does anyone download a lot of "content" from the internet in your household?

Do you have a secured wireless network so that your neighbors cannot access your wireless network without a password? It's also a good idea to only allow computers with specific MAC addresses to access the wireless network.

MAC address = Media Access Control and each wireless device should have a unique address (identity).

You can find out how to locate the MAC address for each PC using the following link:
http://wintelguy.com/2009/20090215_find_mac.html

You then must add those MAC addresses to your wireless router configuration. See your router manual for instructions.

 

[Graemewp]

Definitely make sure you've secured your network, as suggested above. 419GB is a huge amount that could only be used by heavy downloading through torrents or some other kind of file transfer protocol.

 

[HEXiT]

TO USE 419 GIG IN A MONTH your talking at least 6 hours a day at 1.2MBps
skype and wow will use between them about 30kbps depending on the codec used in skype. thats about 800MB per 8 hours (it will actualy be about half that as skype only sends data when the mic is active) so his usage got a month will be about 10-20 gigs max.

so something else is using your bandwidth . either sum1 is downloading about 12 gigs per night consistently if this is the case you can check your hdd space. if thats not the solution then its likely that you have an open wireless network that is either insecure or has been hacked.

personally i go through about 500 gigs a month but my pc is on 16 hours a day... and im always downloading something.

 

[mathew7]

419GB means around 14GB/day (30-day month), 600MB/hour, 170KB/s roughly aka 1.300Mbps. This means 24-7. There's no way WoW and skype could do that. Even WoW's fresh install will not exceed 10GB.

 

[kashifme21]

As the above poster suggested i would check your network, someone is probably using it. Make sure its password protected.