mini box

No, they don't. Is your modem online? Did you add splitters or change the coaxial in your house?

Thought OP said his internet had "gone away" not "gone way up". Disregard. 

What router do you have? Does it have a bandwidth meter? I recently noticed my bandwidth was over and looked and found since installing a chromecast on a kitchen TV. Not only was it streaming HD to a SD screen, but because of some strangeness between the Iphone/chromecast/router stream it was taking 10times the normal amount. 

do you use wifi?

Nowadays, the biggest bandwidth hogs are streaming movies and lots of YouTube.  Is anyone in your household doing that?  Is your TV connected to the Internet?

If not, you may have a neighbor riding your wireless network.  You can check the DHCP table of your router to view who's connecting.  If there's a device you don't recognize, you should block it and change your WiFi encryption key.  You'll need to update all your wireless clients.  However, you'll need to be careful to not block one of your wireless devices, such as a TV, game console, tablet, etc.  The best way to verify your clients is to compare their MAC addresses to the DHCP table.

If you have a wireless client strangely running at a higher capacity, you may have malware running in the background.

Thank you for your reply

Yes I did notice that the Cox usage meter went from under 50g a month, for the last year, to just under 500g for last month. I've had wifi for the last year, I have a Netgear N300 router and a Linksys repeater with  DD WRT on it, both are secure wifi, I checked the logs and have had no unexpected mac connections. Maybe a little bit more streaming, since the cable is off and on so much lately, but I wouldn't think it would be that much.  The mini boxes are the only real difference, I even checked outside to see if any unusual connections were there. I just didn't know if the guide function used dat like some cable boxes do.

500GB!  That's more than a little streaming.  Even if you streamed a 3-hour baseball game in HD everyday for the month, it wouldn't even be half that.

Maybe a Mod could look into it.

I don't think the dd-WRT traffic monitoring will work in repeater mode. In case it does, see here to check. 

What Netgear N300 do you have? Does it have a bandwidth monitor? That would atleast give you something to fact check Cox's data. If you found high bandwidth use, the next step would be to isolate it. That can get complicated, depending on how many devices you have. 

My netgear dose have a monitor, it won't give me anything but but total lan and wan data usage.  The repeater is wired to the netgear so it totals that usage to. I didn't turn the monitor on untill last week. 

t

You can forecast your bandwidth usage:  29 days / 500GB = 17GB per day.  Are your daily totals close to that?  Or are they close to your normal 1.7GB per day?  Also, using the Cox meter, were there any spikes in your usage?  Do those spikes correspond to the days you were streaming while the cable was out?

Yesterday my meter says I used 22 gb of data, their meter says I used  34gb. Today my meter says I used 1.2 gb  I streamed some amazon tv shows last night, that streams in HD and I don't know of any way to stop that. So far the limit which is 350gb on my conection is a soft limit. (no overage fees) It was unlimited when I got it years ago and untill a week ago I thought it still was.

Hi, you can log into your Cox account to check and monitor your data usage daily.  Also, you can review this link for additional information about Cox's Speeds and Data Plans for High Speed Internet Service. http://ww2.cox.com/aboutus/hamptonroads/policies/speedsusage.cox.  Let us know if you have any further questions. 

Logging into my Cox account is how I got my data figures. And according to the data numbers on my Cox data meter, my usage went up 400 gb this month.

I have 3 users. I have grandchildren that use an xbox one so yes to gaming and streaming, but nothing much different from  the past year. According to your meter on your website, for the last year I averaged less than 50 gb of data use monthly, and last month I used over 450gb! NO we did not have a gaming and movie marathon.

As I noted above my router is password protected, and it keeps a log file which logs every event including ip and mac addresses for every connection, I didn't see any connections that shouldn't be there, I'm not saying it cant be hacked, but it would leave a log file for the connection, and it's not there.

I have a cisco gateway DPQ3212, provided by Cox  that is connected by rj45 to my router which is a Netgear WNR 2000, everything else has to go thru that for a wan connection. That router has a log file so evey connection to the internet is recorded and the data is counted. On 4/26/2016 my router data counter recorded that I used 2,182 Mbytes of data ( 2.18 gb) your meter says I used 6.19 Gb of data, something else on your side has to be using data for the difference to be that big. Thats why I thought of the mini boxes. The only other thing I see in my log file is several failed DOS attacks I don't know if that counts as data usage or not, but since it didn't get thru my router it shouldn't.

kentsyl said:
I have a cisco gateway DPQ3212

You know ever since I got phone service and changed from a SB6141 to a DPQ3212, I have seen my bandwidth use (as per Cox) go up. Some of it is at that time we also got a roommate, but looking at their bandwidth use it doesn't add up. Is it possible that the system gets confused by phone modems because they are swapped/refurbished and moved from account to account? Occam's razor suggest most times it's normal use, however, it's still something to consider.