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Android network traffic counter

by Volker Weber

If you need to keep track of your bandwidth usage, NetCounter is your friend. It runs in the background and counts the data exchanged over WiFi and the mobile network. Please keep in mind that your carrier counts in blocks of 10k or even 100k, so your actual mileage will be higher. NetCounter lets you set the start of your month so that it is in sync with your contract.

Just search for NetCounter in your on-device Market application. It's free:

Comments

Ah, sehr gut. Das ist eines der Tools, deren Fehlen einen am Verstand der Zivilisation zweifeln lässt.

And I really don't get why T-Mobile doesn't provide this kind of information in their customer self service portal? Last time I checked they only show the minutes usage – which in my case is roughly zero anyway – but nothing about my data usage. As I use a stick on my MBP and the Android device NetCounter doesn't help all that much.
Maybe that's another reason why tethering looks compelling.

Getting this information from a T-Mobile portal, or even better via API, would also take care of the different interpretations what a block is.

On a sidebar: In May I got an SMS from T-Mobile for the first time, saying that I burned through my 1 GB inclusive volume and that it's gonna be slow from now on until the end of the month. Boy, how right that SMS was. A throttled T-Mobile connection is not only a little slow, it's 4.6 KB/s slow. And to me it looked very flaky too, but that maybe a side effect of the narrow connection.

I haven't tried this out as I will be getting my HTC Hero tomorrow but as I have a 1GB limit a month, this will be one of the first tools I will install.

I see that the program is available in multiple languages but not yet in Dutch, can I apply somewhere to translate it? :-)

Berend, right from the Market app (2nd screenshot) you can send a mail to the author.

Hello Vowe.

I have installed some two softwares like yours because I am a little bit scared with my monthly fees. Yesterday I browsed through 2 different sites in less than 5 minutes (I was looking for a movie to watch with my kids). Both softwares showed that I used 2Mb and I was able to reproduce that same ammount in my home computer today by measuring the traffic with Wireshark, but now I see that my carrier is charging me for about 10Mb. I could not explain that until I read your notice about the 10k/100k charging unit. I suspect that they charge 1kb for every IP message that is smaller than 1000 bytes or even worse. Considering that most users are interested in knowing how much the carrier is going to charge them rather than knowing the exact internet traffic, why don't you create a filter which forecasts the actual charging? As far as I know no Android software has that capability yet. I volunteer to test it, in case you need someone.

Regards,

Nelson

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vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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