What with pretty much every service provider saying bandwidth caps and/or overage fees are inevitable, measuring your bandwidth usage over a period of time is a good exercise, if only to know what you may be in for in the future. Surplus is an OS X application that measures your bandwidth usage. I first heard about it from Ross at SimpleHelp.

You can download SurplusMeter at Skooby Utilities.

When you launch SurplusMeter you’re presented with a straightforward panel. Most important is to set the connection type you receive Internet on using the drop down menu in the upper right corner. Also at the top are options to set your monthly download limit – just for kicks I entered 50 GB. Then click the button in the lower right corner to begin monitoring.

You can click the “+” button in the upper left corner to reduce the size of the panel to move it out of your way as you do your normal, daily activities.

So what did I learn? After ten days, I found we don’t use as much bandwidth as I expected, because we’re both at work the majority of each weekday. However, there is one loophole – iTunes movie rentals of about 3 GB a week which go directly to the Apple TV, bypassing SurplusMeter. However, even after adding in those movies, my ballpark estimate for bandwidth usage is about 30GB a month.

I can breathe a little easier, but I’m still not happy that the days of all you can eat bandwidth are threatened. It’s not fun to have to worry about stuff like this.

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Categories: Apple, General, Technology :: ::

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