Millenicom Usage Checking

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mrschwarz

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 7, 2009
Posts
875
I have been a subscriber to Millenicom since we went full time a couple of years ago. We are using their 20 GB per month 3G plan. In the past year or so, they have become more vigilant about enforcing their caps. Once you have exceeded the cap and it comes to their attention, your only choices are to go without internet for the rest of the billing period or to purchase a new modem and plan. I ran out of bandwidth about a week before the month was up. It was during a month where I wasn?t even using the modem for a couple of weeks.

One of the blogs I follow is Technomadia. They encountered the same problem as me and wrote an entry about it. I am not providing a link because the topic was beaten to death there. Suffice it to say, my problem wasn?t unique and still continues.

Doing research, I learned that sometimes the network providers bandwidth meters would be affected by problems in the network and would over-report usage. In my case, I am guessing that?s what happened. In the time since that occurred, I am using a router that records bandwidth that passes through the wireless modem. If I encounter the same situation, I?ll be able to compare my records with theirs.

The best way to stay under the cap is to be aware of how much bandwidth you?re using. Unfortunately, the tools they provided were pretty rudimentary and they don?t want you using the tools provided by their upstream carrier. Buried deep in their web site is a display that shows how much data their upstream carrier is reporting you used. The entry wasn?t updated very often and you really couldn?t depend on it because of that.

Lately though, they?ve taken to updating their site several times per week. I would like to have an idea of how much bandwidth I?m using as soon as they update their site. There are a lot of mouse clicks and time required to get to the point where the bandwidth used is displayed. Not only that, it only shows the total bandwidth for the month. If you want to know how much you used since the last time it was updated, you need to store the information and do the math.

Since I am lazy an efficiency enthusiast, I came up with a way to automatically:
  • Log into my account
  • Look up the bandwidth used and the last date it was updated
  • Store the information
  • Calculate the bandwidth used since the last update
  • Send myself an email with the latest information

Every night at 1:00 AM, my PC performs this task. I have a log file with a daily entry that I can import into a database or spreadsheet. There is a free scripting system for Windows called ?AutoIT? (http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/). I wrote the script using it. For personal information, there is an ?ini? file (remember those?) that needs to be in the same directory as the executable.

While I am not new to programming, I was new to this tool so I may not have used the most efficient method to do this, but it works. This tool has an active developer community so I got a lot of help with code for manipulating Internet Explorer and Windows. There is not a lot of error checking in it yet. I need to see what some of errors will be through continued testing. This program only writes to a log file. It doesn?t use the registry or make changes to your account at Millenicom. You can look at the source to satisfy yourself.

Before I just throw this out into the world, I would like to have a small group test it. Since I have only run it on a couple of my PCs, I don?t have any other experience for it. I will provide the executable, the source code, a sample ini file and a sample log file. You?ll need to enter your personal information into the ini file. I?ll help if you get stuck.

This was an exercise for my brain, among other things. If you?re interested in testing, send me a PM. I?ll contact the first few respondents with more information and a zip file with everything needed. If you want to look at the source file, you?ll need to download AutoIT.

Thanks in advance for those who PM me.
 
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