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You should also keep an eye on idle data usage. I had several chromecasts plugged in around the house and discovered (with my UniFi setup) that they were each

You should also keep an eye on idle data usage. I had several chromecasts plugged in around the house and discovered (with my UniFi setup) that they were each using about 500MB per day each just sitting idle. That's about 15GB per chromecast per month. Not trivial when you have several of them and a 1TB cap. More details: https://www.howtogeek.com/337719/how-to-tame-your-chromecasts-background-data-usage/ https://www.howtogeek.com/337719/how-to-tame-your-chromecast...

josefresco 6y ago
Agreed, unfortunately my router does not give me this data, so I have to go device-by-device. I'm hoping the UniFi Dream Machine will solve this both by allowing me to throttle, and giving me the data to address individually. I did install a firewall/data logging app on a spare Amazon Fire HD8 and found it downloaded several hundred megabytes of advertisements over a week's time despite sitting in a drawer unused. That was an easy fix. Another glaring data hog was an Amazon FireTV stick which was set to the highest quality. Overall it's been an eye opening experience to see how many devices consume bandwidth with no regard for optimization or giving users control.
- katbyte 6y ago
  i have a UDM-pro and it's done a decent job at that - it's really neat tbh. But only get a UDM pro if you don't need link agger or the ability to control multiple networks from the same controller (i wanted to throw a USG at my parents but can't join it to the UDM pro because.. reasons). it has some annoying limitations (IDS/IPS cannot keep up with my internet anymore) that if i knew about i'd have gotten a USG-pro and a cloudkey.
notyourwork 6y ago
> 500MB What the hell is a idle chromecast doing everyday? That's absurd. Is it outbound WAN traffic or just local network traffic.
- katbyte 6y ago
  probably the images it downloads for the backgrounds it shows while idle? 500mb is a lot even for that thou
  - bagacrap 6y ago
    is that a lot? That's only 20 images of 25MB, and given that these images are supposed to look good on a large TV screen that large size seems reasonable.

josefresco 6y ago

Agreed, unfortunately my router does not give me this data, so I have to go device-by-device. I'm hoping the UniFi Dream Machine will solve this both by allowing me to throttle, and giving me the data to address individually. I did install a firewall/data logging app on a spare Amazon Fire HD8 and found it downloaded several hundred megabytes of advertisements over a week's time despite sitting in a drawer unused. That was an easy fix. Another glaring data hog was an Amazon FireTV stick which was set to the highest quality. Overall it's been an eye opening experience to see how many devices consume bandwidth with no regard for optimization or giving users control.

katbyte 6y ago
i have a UDM-pro and it's done a decent job at that - it's really neat tbh. But only get a UDM pro if you don't need link agger or the ability to control multiple networks from the same controller (i wanted to throw a USG at my parents but can't join it to the UDM pro because.. reasons). it has some annoying limitations (IDS/IPS cannot keep up with my internet anymore) that if i knew about i'd have gotten a USG-pro and a cloudkey.

notyourwork 6y ago

> 500MB What the hell is a idle chromecast doing everyday? That's absurd. Is it outbound WAN traffic or just local network traffic.

katbyte 6y ago
probably the images it downloads for the backgrounds it shows while idle? 500mb is a lot even for that thou
- bagacrap 6y ago
  is that a lot? That's only 20 images of 25MB, and given that these images are supposed to look good on a large TV screen that large size seems reasonable.