On 5/18/2014 (5 days ago), I received an email from my ISP:
As of approximately 11:59 p.m. CT on 05/17/2014, your Internet account had used 391 GB in the current monthly billing period, exceeding the monthly allowance of 350 GB. This is the first time your account has exceeded its monthly allowance since our current plan was put into place. Per that plan, customers are not billed for exceeding the monthly allowance until the third time doing so. Very few customers exceed their allowance; even fewer exceed it three times. In the future, we'll notify you whenever your account approaches its allowance and again if it exceeds that allowance.
Shocked , I decided to look at the daily Internet bandwidth usage, and the spike started on 5/14/2014:
Perplexed, I disconnected everything from the router, including my GenieGO, and plugged my devices back in, one at a time, and the spike occurred when I reconnected my HR44/700 to the router. This was confirmed by my router's custom firmware, which allows me to track bandwidth usage by device. The DirecTV HR44 receiver is consuming approximately 4 GB/hour (100 GB/day!):
It can't be a coincidence that the HR44 just had a software update on or around the same time that this bandwidth consumption started, can it? (per screenshot below, it is Software 0x863, Thu 5/15, 3:56a)
I called DIRECTV support and they were unaware of an issue with the HR44 constantly consuming bandwidth. They've escalated to engineering which is "supposed to call me back within 72 hours" (it's been a couple of days).
This seems to be triggered by trying to watch VOD, but the consumption continues WAY after that point. There seems to be a bug in this software where it is constantly downloading/retrying.
Looking into the router's active connections, it's downloading from these IPs: 205.128.65.253, 206.33.35.252, 209.84.19.253
Accesses to directvapplications.122.2o7.net seem to precede the big downloads.
Any ideas??? I'm fearful my ISP will terminate my connection if this consumption doesn't subside!