I also monitor the bandwidth of each device on my network, and my numbers are much lower than his. The totals that I observed over the last 90 days:

  Device         Download     Upload
  ===========  ==========  =========
  Echo Show A   5.487 GiB  1.451 GiB
  Echo Show B   4.343 GiB  1.293 GiB
  Echo A        0.778 GiB  0.739 GiB
  Echo Dot      0.626 GiB  0.580 GiB
  Echo B        0.132 GiB  0.291 GiB
  -----------  ----------  ---------
  Total        11.366 GiB  4.354 GiB

Also note that both devices in the OP are called "echoshow", which means that they have a full LCD display that you could theoretically stream videos on (if you like watching videos on a 5" display with a terrible interface).

▲ AnotherGoodName 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Fwiw i've had long running devices that just constantly ARP broadcast. Affects the local network only but if that's how you measure bandwidth you'll notice it.

Ie. Non stop "Who has IP/MAC address XYZ? tell ABC" ARP requests, then a second device see's the request for XYZ (which may not even exist on the network anymore!) and realizes it too doesn't know who XYZ is, so it too sends it's own broadcast. And on the cycle goes as devices constantly see others requesting knowledge of XYZ and triggering the request in a cycle.

Embedded devices are especially susceptible to doing this. You might not even notice, apart from a mild "my network feels slow" unless you inspect at network traffic closely. The worst part is these ARP storms basically require you to power down everything and power back up again. In the most classic engineer move the most effective way is to reboot the house. Ie. flip the switch at the fuse breaker and turn the house back on again. That turns all devices off and on again and causes what ever IP/MAC address confusion that triggered the storm to resolve.

Worth investigating for OP. Especially for home networks with a lot of devices. Home routers won't stop a broadcast storm and once it's going they don't stop. Happens more often than is discussed in my experience (i think people just don't notice that poorly programmed devices can do these cyclic and endless ARP requests)

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chatmasta 4 days ago | parent [-]

I wouldn't trust flipping the fuse to the house because of thundering herd issues. When I restart my router I first disconnect all WiFi clients and unplug the Ethernet connections. Then I let it do its thing, download its mysterious updates, etc. Only when it's solidly online do I reconnect the clients one by one...

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theoreticalmal 4 days ago | parent [-]

Do you have smart home devices? And how many user/interactive devices (phones, tables, laptops) do you have? Manually disconnecting and reconnecting WiFi clients would take me hours

	▲	chatmasta 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I only use WiFi on my phone. Everything else is wired, including my laptop since it sits right next to the router and I’ve seen too much of the RF spectrum to rely on it unnecessarily…

▲ diggan 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you also "never using them" like OP and they send/receive that much data? Curious what it is since the Sidewalk thing seems to be limited to 500MB across your account.

	▲	gucci-on-fleek 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I use them multiple times daily, but essentially only for things like "turn off the lights", "set a timer for 30 minutes", or "add cheese to my shopping list". But “Echo A” is probably my most-used device, so usage doesn't seem to be very correlated with the bandwidth consumed.

▲ bazmattaz 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What tool do you use to track bandwidth usage on your network?

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gucci-on-fleek 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I run nlbw2collectd [0] on an OpenWRT router, and then scrape the data with a standard VictoriaMetrics/Grafana setup. It gives me really nice charts showing when each device is active and how much data it is using.

[0]: https://github.com/mstojek/nlbw2collectd

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x2tyfi 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Also curious about this

	▲	bazmattaz 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45155796

▲ HPsquared 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is that usage from doing video calls or streaming?

	▲	gucci-on-fleek 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		No, I essentially only use it for announcements and turning on/off the lights (with some very occasional music streaming). The bandwidth usage appears to be mostly constant 24/7, so I'm not really sure why it's using so much data (but still much less than the OP).

▲ donatj 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Came here to say the same. We use our echos a fair bit but our data use is a fraction of that.