Support call to Mediacom. Seems that between 12-22-14 and 12-25-14 our household suddenly! used 33% of our monthly data cap (yeh, Mediacom has a data cap on cable Internet. Sucky Mediacom). 33% in less than 3 days.
Talked to one guy who said there was nothing he could do. I told him to just shut up and give me his supervisor, because I wouldn’t listen to any more BS from him. While I was on hold waiting for someone to come on and claim to be his supervisor, I changed our wireless access key (WPA-PSK2) from one 16-character uppercase/lowercase/alphanumeric/symbol nonsense password (a mix of three registration keys from commercial software I no longer use and haven’t for some time *shrugs* It’s one of many techniques for coming up with moderately secure passwords. While I was at it, I set the Win8 computers to meter their network usage. *shrugs* It’s easy to do, so why not?) to another.
Person claiming to be a supervisor came on the line. I had to expound upon the problem all over again, because the incompetent person I first talked to had not relayed ANY information. That took a while. I was asked to hold for a while. She came back on the line and told me others had reported similar issues and she would dispatch a technician to examine [whatever]. She also told me I probably ought to change my wireless access key. (Which I had done BEFORE she spoke to me.)
Now, here’s where it gets interesting. All the above–being put on hold twice, two conversational episodes with the latest helpdesk person–took about 20 minutes. In that time, AFTER I had changed the wireless access password–our Internet usage (only ONE Internet-capable computing device even on during this time) was nearly one gigabyte of data. I told the “supervisor” that, and. . . since then, nearly 24 hours by now, only another 200 megabytes of usage has been recorded.
Nearly a gig of data “consumed” in ~20 minutes AFTER having changed the password (the only remedy offered by the helpdesk “supervisor”) and only about 200MB in the, now, nearly 24 hours since, with three and sometimes four devices using the connection.
I fully expect to have some lame excuse proffered proposing that it was the password change that made the difference, but since changing the password, immediately broke the wireless connection on the computer used to do it, nearly a gig of data was supposedly downloaded through our network after that, but the data stream didn’t slow until after I informed the “supervisor” that the data stream had continued to flow at such a rate AFTER the remedy she suggested had been in effect for the past 20 minutes. Yeh, I actually got a moment of silence on that one, and. . . since then, normal data streams.
Mediacom will still try to push it off on us, but they’ll be in for a surprise. No, the scenario does not definitively say HOW the change happened–either way–but it does walk and quack suspiciously like a duck.