terabyte monthly limit overage with no change in users or typical patterns of daily usage

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@ecinut wrote:

As per the instructions in the original thread, I am creating a question specific to my account.   November usage spiked compared to prior months (2 to 3 times the monthly usage of all prior months) and the ComcastJessie post states the mis-metering problem was fixed during the prior month.   I believe the metering is incorrect for my account.   I have not taken any of the nerdy port, ip, fixit/troubleshoot steps recommended by other forum users, but I have verified that no unknown devices are accessing our router.

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Apologies for the issue and the experience that you described above.

In the interest of the customer experience, I have applied a credit to your account while our team researches your account further.

The credit will appear on your next printed statement and you can view the credit online via My Account.

I have also asked a colleague to review your account and contact you directly for any next steps. Thanks for your patience.

The link below has some general information on how to avoid overage charges and tips to conserve data usage:
https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-avoid-overage-charges

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@kjquiro wrote:

Hi,

I was also experiencing higher than usual data meter reading, and I know it was impossible for me to use more than a terabite of data in november. I called xfinity customer service mutiple times fustrated because no one could help me.

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Apologies for the issue and the experience that you described above.

In the interest of the customer experience, I have applied a credit to your account while our team researches your account further.

The credit will appear on your next printed statement and you can view the credit online via My Account.

I have also asked a colleague to review your account and contact you directly for any next steps. Thanks for your patience.

The link below has some general information on how to avoid overage charges and tips to conserve data usage:
https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/data-usage-avoid-overage-charges

Good evening, ecinut and kjquiro. Thank you for coming here for support and for posting your questions/comments. We can assist you in doing a bit of research to see what might be going on, up to a certain extent. Beyond that, we sometimes have to get our Security Assurance team involved. However, we can take a look here first. Please send us a private message (each of you separately of course) with your first and last names and we can go from there.

To send a private message, please click our name "Comcast_Support" then select "Send a Message" on the right side.

Thank you.

Oddly enough, the usage spike dropped off at the beginning of this month, and shows about 18gigs used through this morning, which matches what my Netgear Genie monitoring software shows.

Again, this abrupt dropoff in Comcast's table of monthly usage bears absolutely no relationship to any change in our web/smart tv usage, as we have not changed anything since being notified of the overage, so entirely non-dependent on user behavior.

All -  Providing some additional information, background and tips below from our team that does the data overage reviews.

Customer owned devices
- One example are devices like Ubiquiti uNiFi, which our team most commonly sees as an issue with data usage. The device has an internal metering system along with a periodic speed test built into it. The speed test can accrue massive amounts of data usage without reporting to its own internal metering system because it’s part of its system functions, not a device using data even though it is using data. We report its usage because we monitor for all data traffic going to and from the modem/network, not per device connected to their network.

- The number and kinds of devices connected to your network matters. Suggestion is to log into your router to see and verify all the devices connected to your network" (very applicable with customer owned devices).

Metering System:
- Comcast does not have direct access into the metering system to the extent to be able to artificially input or output data usage results or information. Our metering system is regularly audited as well where information on it can be gathered from https://www.netforecast.com/.
It includes everything from the yearly audits to how the metering system works on a technical level. This is done third party outside of Comcast.

Comcast data metering accuracy reports at the link below:
https://www.netforecast.com/comcast-internet-usage-accuracy-reports/

- The metering system is delayed by up to 24 hours. "I watched my meter and it went up by 100GB in the last 3 hours and I just booted up my computer for 15 minutes!" is not accurate - the metering timeframe is not 1:1 - its delayed because it needs to validate data and remove any data that we do not count towards the metering system. This includes things like firmware updates we push out and any other possible data we may push to the network for normal operations.

- Greatest opportunity with Windows 10 devices. Windows 10 has a built in data usage meter for its own data tracking per application/software used on the device for 30 days(Settings -> Network & Internet -> Data Usage tab).

- Similarly could be done for other devices, ex: “Go into Netflix settings and make sure that it pauses after not watching it for a while”, etc.

Overall:
There is no trend or consistency indicating an issue in metering, but rather these recent customer concerns have all been unique issues per network requiring the subscriber to troubleshoot/review their network.

The common trend topic is “there is no way I can use this much data”. While the number amount of data a customer can see on the meter is more than what they know to be using, doesn’t mean it isn’t being used.

Common data users:
- Streaming devices left on even when TVs are turned off – continuously streaming and/or misconfigured settings on streaming devices
- Data backups (including cloud backups)
- Large file downloads for entertainment (video games, updates, locally downloaded movies/videos from online services, etc.) or business purposes (files of information/data for business needs, Data backups downloaded from or uploaded to, etc.)