Once again I find we are exceeding our broadband's monthly data cap (even since it's been doubled). A friend of mine recommended an alternate ISP that offers a $5 per month service for all your YouTube data. I suspect that the younger members of the house use a lot of the bandwidth watching videos but I don't know if they're using YouTube or other sites.
Is there a tool I can install that would allow me to see how much data we're getting from YouTube, or how much we get from all websites visited? We use Windows 7 on the main PC.
Thanks.
Best Answer
To my understanding, there are 2 approaches to your issue.
IP Traffic
You want to determine how much bandwidth is spend on certain websites. This would usually be done by record the IP traffic and then looking at the IP addresses involved.
For this, we already have several solutions available, like here: How can I monitor internet usage in my network?
These solutions were not desirable for you as you obviously don't know all IP addresses involved for every website.
Time
Another approach I want to suggest to you is simply monitoring where your kids spend their time on the net.
For this, there is functionality (almost) built-in into Windows 7 itself. There is the Windows Live Essentials - Family Safety package.
According to the reading materials online, it will allow you to generated detailed activity reports from which you should be able to tell where your kids spend their time (and bandwidth).
Once you determined which sites may be problematic (due to their content or bandwidth consumption), the Family Safety package should also allow you to deploy counter-measures.