Accuracy of one's home router's bandwith monitor compared to your service providers

[cmf21]

My parents and I got our local service providers bill for the last month. For ever gb over 25gb, they charge us a $1. Apparently we used 16gb over and got charged an extra $16. I checked our home router and it shows we used a around 24gb up and down for the month. We have no clue how we went over by 16gb when service was out for 4 days, and we were gone for 2.

Anyways, we went down to the service providers location and asked them how we could have gone over by 16gb when we didn't have service for at least 6 days and that our router only showed us using around 24gb when they said we used around 41gb.

Their response was is your router secured? Of course, I'm not that stupid. Then they proceded to tell us out router isn't accurate and not giving us the correct amounts and that they go off their cp's or something?


Anyways, I was just wondering how accurate or different is the bandwith monitor in our routers is compared to what our service providers is.

They recently raised rates and changed how they bill us and we were wondering if their trying to pad the gb's in order to get more revenue.

 

[Fallen Kell]

At most, it should be less then 1% off from the bandwidth, assuming it is not a botched monitoring implementation. The 1% is from possible added encapsulation that might occur to packets as they go from your router to your service provider's gear.

 

[colonelciller]

sounds fishy...
try contacting your router manufacturer and get their opinion

 

[Gryz]

Most likely your router got rebooted during the last month. Usually statistics are stored in RAM. And not backed up in non-volatile memory (like flash). So when the router reboots, crashes, or you just have a short electrical outage, all counters will be reset to zero.