Data cap and usage meter

If you doing some searching on this forum, and others, you'll see complaints about the Cox data usage meter and data caps.  Numerous people have complained that at times the meter does not align with their own data.  Certainly, there are reason this could happen including misconfigured devices, open WIFI access points, over streaming and ignorant teenagers.  

However, those who monitor their connections and traffic (including overhead) as we do have shown the aforementioned issues have not happened and the numbers just don't add up.  We experienced such a problem recently where the meter said we used 190GB in one day and 150GB a few days later.  Our normal usage pattern, which was seen in historical data before the issue, was about 30GB per day due to streaming video content.  Nothing was misconfigured and everything was reviewed and tested.  We found no issues.

Also note that the metering is done upstream.  Per a NetForecast audit of the metering, "... usage related to inbound probes and attacks, which normally are filtered by the home router firewall, are counted in the ISP usage meter" which means traffic you're not requesting, but heads towards your firewall, is charged against you.  In researching the issue, one amazing complaint said that during an outage in a service area the meter continued to tick against them.

Cox refused to address the assumed overage during two initial calls when raising it immediately saying nothing could be done until the bill for the period was issued.  Unfortunately, perhaps we lost leverage to get the charges removed when we left the service due to Cox not addressing it when we noted it and also due to them yet again raising our rate for premium service 2 months earlier.  We had enough...

When canceling service, their only option to retain us was to provide their own 1GB service for more money than our new provider and still with a data cap.