@winybulldogge it sounds almost as though something in your environment has becoming infected by a bot.  Have you rolled back to the pre-Deco network, and has your monthly usage gone back down?  I'm on an unlimited broadband package and the billing system does not let me see data-usage, and so I have no way to compare my typical monthly usage with and without Deco.  I might have the ability to insert a traffic monitor between the Deco and the ONT - I suspect I will not be happy until I have, and proved my environment one way or the other.

Whilst it is more likely that a device attached to the LAN is likely to harbour a bot, it would be inappropriate to rule anything out or in.

Good luck finding whatever is eating into your allocation.

Ever since I purchased the AXE5300 from Costco in Aug 2023, my Xfinity data useage shot through the roof.  My prior use was about 1TB a month prior to August using my old Apple Airport Extremes.  Then I bought the AXE5300 and my use in Aug went up to 2TB and a whopping 6TB in Sept for no known reason.  Makes no sense and TP-Link offers no way to monitor data use over time and is needed badly.  

Also, there must be something wrong with the devices themselves that causes them to conituously use data at a rate of 2-6x my normal use (firmware bug?).  Something is going on and TP-Link support has been of non help to date.

Hi  @IcemanTX 

It seems that @winybulldogge's experience of high data utilisation is not an isolated case, and this interests me.

I am hoping that @TP-Link people are reading this (I hope that tag is a real tp-link person).

I will go straight in with the worst case scenario (sensationalism & headline-grabbing might help gain traction) - the high utilisation might be caused by malware-infected firmware in the tp-link device.  By this I am suggesting that some criminal's command and control system is using these tp-link devices to attack other systems out there, or perhaps they are exfiltrating your data to a third party.  If this is the case, then it is very bad.  Can we be sure that this is the case? - No, not without further investigation.  So for now this is just a theory which needs to be explored.

However, it is just as likely that a device connected to the tp-link is causing the excessive bandwidth utilisation.  Without the tp-link providing device utilisation statistics, we are left blind - and this explanation is also just conjecture. 

If we tentatively suggest that a LAN-attached device is the cause of the high utilisation, then why might this coincide with the deployment of the tp-link device?  It could be pure coincidence (we only have a sample of two at the moment) - but it would be interesting to know whether the high utilisation goes away if you were to revert to original Apple Airport Extremes.

It is also possible that some default behaviour of the tp-link device is allowing traffic through that the previous firewall/router did not (e.g. UPnP).  It might be that a video streaming device's use of mDNS is somehow being transported by the tp-link?  This is yet more conjecture and would need a much deeper investigation.

There is a less worrying scenario: we can sign into the TP-Link Deco app on our smartphones from anywhere on the Internet to view the status of our network and live utilisation stats.  So, is this information being pumped out to the tp-link servers all the time - even when we're not looking at the stats?  If so, then here is an obvious candidate for why the utilisation might have gone up.  It doesn't make it acceptable, but it is less worrying that the earlier scenarios.

I really will have to find time to put a network analyser on my WAN interface.

Richard.

Monthly (etc) bandwidth usage also not availble on PX50. It would be great to have.