Comcast made a lovely announcement last week that they were imposing bandwidth caps for their users. The limit is 250 GB a month. I have no idea how much bandwidth I use. Funny thing is Comcast is not giving users a way to determine how much bandwidth they actually use!

Comcast suggests using one of the “many online tools…to measure [your] consumption.” The problem I had was trying to find a tool that could measure all the devices in our household that access the Internet. You would think Internet access is limited to computers, but in this day and age there are many devices that access the Internet for information. We have two laptops, one desktop, two iPhones, an XBox 360 and a Nintendo Wii. I think that covers everything. So what tool would work for all these devices?

Luckily my searches stumbled upon a firmware alternative called Tomato. It did require me to purchase a Linksys WR54GL router, but I lucked out as it was on sale at Fry’s. The setup instructions were straightforward. I was up-and-running in less then twenty minutes. I am now set to track how much bandwidth I use.

I’ll let you know how it goes at the end of this month.