Very large uplink data usage on Vodafone 4G network

DennyH

My colleague purchased an MBB sim from Vodafone Ireland last week to use in a 4G Wifi routers as alternative broadband option as DSL throughput is fairly limited in his area. The most we could get from Vodafone was a 20GB per month package but we both reckoned that would probably be enough for him.

On my advice he purchased a Huawei B593-s22 4G router online from Amazon UK. On Friday I put the sim in the router and everything came up first time with zero input required. I was pretty impressed with that. We changed the default SSID and WPA key to make it more secure and we verified everything was working fine with decent 4G download and upload speeds. I left his place at ca. 6pm Friday evening.

On Saturday afternoon the modem stopped working. On Monday I called up Vodafone tech support to check and they told me the sim had been barred because he had used 35GB of data since Friday!! I called my colleague and he said he had done very little in that time - just some speed tests and a he had watched a 1 hour program on RTE player. It was just his laptop and Samsung Galaxy smartphone that was connected to the wifi on the Huawei router. He had not given new wifi details to his wife or kids.

Today I called back to his place and logged into the router. It reported that indeed 35GB of data had been consumed but over 95% of it (33.9GB) was uplink traffic! This was totally unexpected because typically 80% or more of home BB traffic is downlink.

Does anybody have any clue what this might be? As far as he knows his laptop or smartphone are not configured to perform any system back up to the cloud or anything like that. It would have taken forever to upload that amount of data on his DSL connection as that had uplink throughput below 1Mbps.

I'll have to go into hiding when the bill arrives

ED E

Torrents. That or malware.