Sudden huge increase in internet data usage

We have the same issue. Our data usage double in December even though we were out of the country a good portion of the month. The same thing is happening in January. I just got a message that we’re at 75% even though we were out of town more than a week out of the last three. This is ridiculous. We don’t do any gaming. We’re gone all day, and haven’t changed any of our habits. 

I think there is something terribly wrong with the way Xfinity is reporting Data usage.

It is showing usage of around 20GB per day.

1. The stats on my router just behind the cable modem shows approx. 2GB (Transmit and Receive)

2. I have not used Youtube app in my smart TV in the last 48 hours. Even when I used I had set the resolution to 240p.

The math does not add up. Either it is a bug in Xfinity reporting or a scam.

Xfinity does not give details on the breakdown of data usage from Cable modem, Smart TV or Xfinity Apps on Mobile devices.

I contacted their advanced support and they promised to send the data breakdown.

Have any of use faced the same issue?

October 300 gb November 600 gb December 1.3 Tb??????

 Customer service was not helpful at all, rude disrespectful and refused to help. If this continues  like this I have no choice but to end my service. This is 100% not my usage, I have been doing the same things on the internet for 3 years and never exceeded 700 gb.

I just found out the exact same issue. 

I give up! I did hit my limit for this month. xfinity charged $20 for more data but that should be waved since my first overage. I need to figure this out or I will take my business elsewhere. I can't believe I use this much data with a computer and a smart tv. That works out to 40GB per day. No way! Something is totally wrong. They closed this topic but reopened it for some reason. I will switch after next month.

As a family of 2, I find it difficult to believe we have exceeded our monthly internet limit. We have 3 tvs and typically use our unlimited cell data for our phones. I received one notification in 2021 that we went over and then nothing (we didn’t change anything) until Dec and now Jan. Based on reviewing this same complaint by many comcast customers, this is not isolated and may be a flaw which is adversely impacting customers. 

My plan is 200mbps, but now the download is around 5mbps and upload is around 0.5mbps. Comparing the data usage last month (which is 700GB), this month is over 1.3TB.

We have already reset the wifi, still can't find the issue here.

Ditto here. Average monthly usage is 354GB (October 2021 = 307GB, Nov 2021 = 323GB, Dec 2021 = 431GB) out of 1229GB "1.2TB" plan.

Suddenly January 22 2021 I got email notice of 75% usage; January 26 90% and now I'm over 100% at 1440GB on January 29 with a few more days to go in the month.

The tier 2 called me back and I forced them to look at daily usage and I'm usually anywhere from 10-50 BUT on Saturday January 22 and then on Wednesday January 26 the usage spiked to 600+! 

My habits have not changed: one person working from home during the day, News and then Netflix etc at night.

Tier 2 suggested I change my wi-fi password which I finally figured out how to do.  Spoke with a tech friend and they said there is no way I would be using 600 in a day. 

I need to go poke around to see if we have access to see the daily usage as I think I only saw monthly information and month to date info but not daily.

Adding us to the list. We went from roughly 300GB/month to going over...no changes in our home. It's only me & my husband. I've been working from home for 14+ years full time & my husband started last year. We are suddenly receiving messages that we're approaching our limit. We were at 68 GB of 1.2 TB remaining as of a couple of hours ago. We stream a few shows/week & don't game. It's impossible that we're using that much data. I called customer service & tried the chat; both were useless. It's infuriating. 

Your link doesn't work, It gives a "404 not found". I'm having the same problem as everyone else here. My data usage has gone up progressively since July 2021. I'm now at over 1000gb for January 2022. My habits have not changed and my son and I are not doing anything differently. I've gone as far as to change the password on my router thinking someone hacked my network. It didn't help. If this continues, I will drop my Xfinity Internet. This seems to be some sort of scam that Comcast is doing to increase Internet bills and I will not put up with it.

Here is the link for this thread as requested: https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/your-home-network/sudden-huge-increase-in-internet-data-usage/61a2783f50b737295335e3e8

I expect to hear from someone from Comcast in the next couple of days. If not, bye, bye.

Glad I found this forum because today, I got the dreaded - You have reached 75% of your data E-mail, totally out of the blue.  We've been Comcast/Xfinity customers for 20 years, are a 2 person household with no kids and while I work from home, I have for the past 2 years since the pandemic and since October, our monthly data usage has supposedly shot up 137% in January:  Oct 2021 = 393 GB, Nov 2021 = 422 GB, Dec 2021 = 633 GB and Jan 2022 = 931 GB as of today.  We've done nothing except buy a new modem and lower our TV package in December so we may be streaming a little bit more but Xfinity says 1.2 TB gets you 18 hours of streaming a day.  We aren't in the ballpark of that and never have been.  I don't buy that all of us are having other devices jumping on our WiFi and using our data without us realizing, especially since the timing is all right around December, January, it seems.  I tried calling customer service today and took 15 minutes before I could finally get it to ring through to an actual person, then was told by a recording the wait time to speak to an agent was an hour and a half and before I could choose for them to call me back when it was my turn, another recording came on saying they were having technical issues with the system and to call back another time -and it HUNG UP on me.  You can't tell me with that kind of volume, there isn't a bigger issue going on right now with a lot of customers.  I will NOT pay for any overages nor will I upgrade to the unlimited plan because I can't imagine why we would need it.  I hope they get this issue figured out soon - I don't want to move to another provider but I'm not going to let them scam me either.

Has anyone had this issue with Xfinity resolved? I'm now on my second phone conversation with customer service that tells me i will hear back in 24-72 hours... No response from the last time, so i do not feel very confident they will be of any help. Xfinity data usage number seem to be inflated by 25-30%. Our household typically uses 650-900GB of data per month, all of a sudden our numbers are up 30%. When i dug into this a little deeper when logging into my router, the router keeps a tally of the data usage per month. In the last two months i have used roughly 1 Terabyte of data each month but Xfinity reports that our household used 1.254 TB of data which puts us over. On top of that, my sister in law lives in the next town over and they are having the exact same issue the last two months. This needs to be looked into by an outside source. This seems like a ploy to force people to upgrade services to me.

Nope, no resolution.

Hello everyone. I have an update on my experience with this issue.

History:

I first stumbled upon this forum in late November 2021 when I was informed that my data usage was at 70% of my monthly allowed 1281GB. Soon after that I was pinged that I was at 90%. Then it went over 100%, and I was informed by Xfinity that they were giving me a 1 month courtesy of not charging me for going over the limit. Up to this point, in the 12 years I've had Xfinity Internet and Phone service (no TV), I'd never paid much attention to how much data my wife and I used per month. When I did happen to check, it was always so far below the limit, it wasn't worth spending time worrying about it. But along came November 2021 and changed that. Since it's only my wife and I at home and we hadn't made any changes in data usage habits or added new features or new equipment, I was puzzled by the 10-fold increase spike.

Actions that have NOT made a difference:

Resetting the router: Like most of you, I contacted Xfinity twice, and had the same lack of positive results you have. One Xfinity person remotely reset my router. Since I work with networking in the microchip manufacturing industry, I know enough about electronics to have gone through all the basics first before contacting Xfinity, so I had already power cycled the cable modem (multiple times).

Looking for unknown users on my wifi: I found a free program that lets me see who is on my wifi network, because I wondered if someone nearby had hopped on and was eating up my data. I could not find a smoking gun.

On-site technician: So, I called Xfinity again. They sent out a technician, which cost me $90. Unfortunately, the young man was inexperienced and probably knew less that I do. He did check the signal clear from the connection in the back yard to inside my house, but found nothing wrong.

New cable modem: In the last call to Xfinity they suggested there could be a problem with the cable modem. I was highly doubtful of this, but since I wanted to find the root cause, I went ahead and updated my cable modem. By the way, long ago I took the step of buying my own cable modem. It doesn't make financial sense to rent one monthly from Xfinity, especially when you can buy the same make and model they rent to you. Xfinity doesn't like this, but whatever they've said was just so much dust in the air. As you can guess, the new cable modem made no difference.

Actions that have made a difference:

Powering off cable modem during Holiday vacation:  By this time it is mid-December and my data is approaching 80%. Fortunately, we went out of town to spend the Holidays with family. Before leaving, I powered off my cable modem.  That action actually made a difference; my data usage stopped at 1144GB. We returned a couple of days before the New Year, turned it back on, but didn't go over the limit. I monitored the data usage while we were away, but it stayed steady without any increase. I was really concerned that it would keep increasing. If that had occurred, then I would have 2 suspects: 1) Some virus had invaded and was using my computer horsepower for itself, or 2) something is really wrong at Xfinity. There still may be something going on at Xfinity, but I don't have proof of that at this point.

Deleting a huge file hung up in my Outlook Outbox. I happened to notice that I had a huge file (containing a video) that was hung up in my Outlook email. That may not seem like a problem, but I found it was causing my Outlook to continually try to update the Outbox and resend the file in the background. Looking closer at what Outlook was telling me, I could see it was having difficulty sending much of any of my emails. I wondered if this constant action could have used up a good portion of my data allotment, I didn't have success deleting the file at first, but then I did a Google search and found out how. Once I successfully deleted it, Outlook was no longer continually trying to update the Outbox anymore. Since that point, my data usage has come back to what I consider normal (about 110GB for the month of January), one tenth of what it was in November and December.

Conclusion: I don't know if this is the answer for anyone else, and I'm not positive that this is what decreased the data usage for me. It may be pure coincidence, but this is what I have experienced. I decided to monitor my data usage for the entire month of January before posting an update. If anyone finds this update useful, please post your results. If anyone finds something else helpful, please post that as well. If this reoccurs for me, I will post again and start raising the flag higher at Xfinity. Maybe it will require a complaint to the FCC. I don't know. 

One thing is for sure.  Xfinity isn't doing themselves any favors with their gear not being able to log device usage stats.  If people could see it themselves, there wouldn't be 9 pages on this thread.  People think they aren't doing anything new as far as internet habits go, but the truth is it changes all the time, and can change at any time. 

OS updates.  Phones updates.  Program updates -- all can get stuck and burn data.  Apps and programs on the phones/computers contain maulware.  Browsers can fall victim to it as well.  Windows, has become a chatter box of automatic web surfing it does all by itself.  Default settings are horrid on most devices.  Streaming services/apps themselves change.  Network speed changes at Xfinity, so more speed = bigger chance of slamming more data.  Not just on your streaming service, but also on streams in your browser.  It all adds up.  You can also now watch 4K UHD on Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube, plus X1 customers can get 4K streams.  Perhaps people didn't notice the resolution shift.  Wide open, with no throttling on your part, you may shift into a data pig stream. 

I don't see another way to keep tabs on it, other than running everything through a device that can report it, and do something about it, if you want to avoid a data cap.  I would also expect the data use to continue to increase as time goes on for everyone.  Perhaps Xfinity will increase the cap.  Perhaps not.

Also.  If your data use has skyrocketed, you ought to be more concerned about the security implications, than the cable bill.