Well, it's about four hours later, and the rate of discrepancy has calmed down and gone back to "normal."
Earlier, the difference between the Usage Meter and my Netgear router was about 40MB, with HughesNet saying 120MB and Netgear saying 80MB (rounded). Now, HughesNet is at 283MB and Netgear is at 236MB, which is 47MB of difference. So, I've used 163MB more according to HughesNet, and 156MB more according to Netgear, which is only 7MB of difference, and much more acceptable. It's been, on average, about 50MB to 60MB of difference per HughesNet tallied GB (when HughesNet says 1000MB, Netgear says 940MB to 950MB). This difference, though a little annoying, isn't that bad, but what happened earlier was just crazy.
Hopefully, what occurred earlier won't do so again. Why it did occur is a complete mystery.
I'm totally ignorant about this stuff. I'm just happy when I can connect to the Internet. Herp derp. :)
Only thing that I can think of that might explain it is HughesNet and the router/Glasswire counting things differently when it comes to certain ports. As in counting something that isn't being counted by the others.
I dunno but is all that comes to mind why there could be such a big difference especially in the first case you posted. Would be nice if they published more in depth technical data on the HT2000W but doubt that will happen.
Who knows how compression is affecting things also. Would think the result being HughesNet reporting less use than router/Glasswire but could be the reverse in certain situations.
The whole data counting thing on the user end seems to be less than 100% accurate when throwing in all the different configuration possible. Good old smoke and mirrors at work. Only reason we even look at it so closely is because we're on capped data. Most folks not on satellite internet have no clue how much data they use.
I've noticed that I've been literally burning through data lately again, similar to what I noticed about a year ago, where data usage seems to be twice as much as what you think you're using, or more.
Either it's a change in the compression scheme, something causing packet resends between here and the gateway, or a couple of other paranoid theories I've had for a while that might explain some external phantom usage:
Basically it has to do with bittorrent like protocols, where someone from the network might be excessively pinging your public IP, forcing data usage. If someone else using the IP 'shared' files it's very possible that other(s) have that IP stored from a recent session and are trying to reconnect. Might be your bad luck that you were assigned that IP. Forcing a new dynamic IP assignment from a reboot should alleviate something like that, but hasn't really for the most part.
Similarly, it could also be people probing known HN IP ranges with unblocked ports. Noticed this happens when spam levels tend to rise - basically unscrupulous people looking for ways to hack into unprotected servers to implant spam bots. Spam levels have been up and down erratic for a while now.
I prefer to blame one of the sketchy iOS games my wife plays on her phone (Cascade?), although I think that's not really it.
