[Our House]

OP is my girlfriend. We have her computer and my computer wired on a standard windows network with everyone's favorite Linksys WRT54G router. There's also a laptop in the other room that she uses only for her school work. The laptop is connected via encrypted wireless, but is never used for anything online except the daily anti-virus updates. All three computers are completely virus-free.

The ISP website updates bandwidth statistics every hour or so. Our usage has been going up at a rate of ~11MB/hour (give or take) when all computers are connected, but idle. The bandwidth monitor our computers have on them is showing a usage of 1600bites/hour for each desktop when idle, and higher when using the net.

We're not using anything strange to transfer data between PCs. As a matter of fact, we haven't even transferred any files; we've only used my desktop to watch Sopranos episodes that are on zero's PC...and that's been done through the Microsoft Home Network. The last time we watched an episode, the monitor on our computers showed that bandwidth usage shot up drastically. My computer "downloaded" ~300MB and her computer "uploaded" ~300MB. The episode was just above 300MB in size. Zero's not around right now, so we haven't checked the ISP's report since her last post (or since watching that 300MB episode).

What I think is happening is the ISP is somehow monitoring packet usage instead of bandwidth usage. Is it possible that they're using a local "cookie" on each PC to measure? Also, does anyone know if there is a way to check bandwidth stats at either the router or modem level instead of on each PC?

Thanks for the help. We need to straighten those bastards out.