Yachts: Ericsson W25 - Monitoring Internet Usage, What’s a KiB?

For my yachting customers I’m interested in ways to monitor the Internet data usage - especially in light of my recent blog post about the 5GB limit imposed by AT&T on their 3G Cellular Network.

In the web interface of the Ericsson W25 - Open your browser to your bookmark or favorite for the unit, or enter http://192.168.1.1 (or whatever is the configured IP Address of the unit.) Login as username: user, Password: user. Newer firmwares you may only have to enter the Password: user.

On the left side click on the tab for the “Internet” page. Just below the Link Status is a section with a heading TRAFFIC STATISTICS. This section has Transmitted and Received counters - and includes Transmitted and Received “Current Month” and “Previous Month”. This information can be useful in determining how much data traffic (Internet) you have used - and can help you to avoid going over the AT&T 5GB per month usage.

Note: I haven’t tested as to wether these counters survive a reboot or power cycle of an E W25 unit - so I’m seeking anyone that has one that can tell me if the totals remain the same after a power or manual reboot of the unit.

We’re always talking about Kilobytes (KB) and Megabytes (MB) and even Gigabytes (GB) when we’re talking about computer hard drives, memory, and things like 3G Data Transfer Totals - So what is this (KiB) thing that we’re seeing in the Ericsson W25?

Kibi’s Mebi’s and Gibi’s oh my! Lions and Tigers and Bears oh my! It’s worth having a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte to help us make sense of that. Basically manufacturers and such have helped make a mess of the terms by rounding things off to base-10 numbers, for example making Kilobytes = 1000 bytes and Megabytes = 1,000,000 bytes. Those nice round numbers are easier for humans to think about than the truth which is that a Kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes. So 1 Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes, and 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes. One could easily see how you could start loosing some bytes when you get to the bigger echelons like Mega and Giga. Or your total count can be off because of rounding off…

So Kibi, Mebi, and Gibi (oh my!) have come to the rescue to keep us on track. Newer Linux Operating System uses these terms - and so thus the Ericsson W25 does as well.

* Anyway - I’m looking for the answer to my question - Does the E W25 keep those statistic totals on the Internet Page beyond a reboot? or are they zeroed out?

I’m also at the understanding from E W25 documentation that the counters are reset before it ever reaches 5GB - reference the following manual excerp:

Note: The data size and packet counters have the upper limits of 4 GiB
and 2 to the 32nd power  packets (more than 4 billion packets). When these limits
have been reached, the counters wrap around to zero.

* Hopefully this can be a tool to help my yacht / boat customers (and others on land) keep track of their Kib, Mib, and Gib usage on their E W25 and keep them below the 5GB (GiB?) limit in place by AT&T. This along with periodically logging into your wireless.att.net account page and checking the usage - seem to be good ideas for NOW.

* Alan Spicer Marine Telecom is all about helping the customers to use Internet Access Technologies to save money on their Internet / Data bills - and to choose options (often multiple options) for the best savings at their particular current geographic location.

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Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

http://www.marinetelecom.net and http://www.wifiyacht.net

+1 954 683 3426

This entry was posted on 5. March 2009 at 23:52 and is filed under Cellular Voice and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.