Hi,
I live in Hyderabad but Hathway cable modem is not yet very common here, hence I am shamelessly posting to a Mumbai list with my question! My apologies!
I have had this service (Hathway cable modem metered service, 300 MB/month limit) for almost a month now, and I am about to give up on it because what their website shows as my "usage" is far higher than what my iptables firewall shows I have downloaded (sum of all IP traffic coming to my machine).
My observations are that if I stay online (without actually surfing) for more than 2-3 hours, this difference is quite noticeable. "ifconfig eth0" (which shows IP *plus* non-IP traffic, as opposed to iptables' input chain, which shows only IP traffic) is closer to what they claim is my "usage", and using tcpdump I realise that the difference is the constant stream of ARP traffic (amounting to about 300-500 KB/hour!)
More bizarre, if I stay online beyond midnight, the next day the usage is almost double of what you would expect even from the "extra" caused by ARP being counted, so I'm effectively getting hit twice when I do that! Some serious double-counting bug in their software :-)
My question to the group: has anyone in Mumbai noticed this? People using Windows will have no way easy way of detecting this, which may explain Hathway's extremely polite but otherwise apathetic attutude to my concerns, so I have to ask Linux people this question...
Thank you!
Sitaram