5 ways to find out what’s hogging your bandwidth at home

Ever thought your home network felt sluggish, and you wanted to know what’s eating up all your bandwidth? While it could be someone stealing your Wi-Fi, the reason is usually one or more of your devices are hogging the available bandwidth for themselves. These days, there are plenty of tools to check which devices are using more than their share, from programs to inbuilt bandwidth checkers in your operating system or router.

5 Windows settings

Windows 11 has built-in monitoring, but only for your device

If you suspect your desktop PC is the bandwidth hog you’re looking for, you can find out quickly and easily if you’re using Windows 11. That’s because Microsoft built a data tracker into the operating system, after many calls from the community to include one. Whether you’re trying to keep under your data cap, are wondering if your PC is taking all the bandwidth so your other devices can’t use it, or are worried about malware, it’s nice to finally have an option without having to install additional software.

To find it, open Settings and click on Network & internet. At the top right, you’ll see Data usage and a number that tells you how much you’ve used in the last 30 days. Selecting that opens a new page that will tell you how much data you’ve used and which programs have been using it. You can also enter a data limit, which gives you a notification when you’re getting close but won’t actually stop you from using data past that point. Mine shows mostly gaming and video conferencing-related usage, which is what I’d expect to see based on what I do on my computer. If you see any programs you don’t recognize using lots of data, it’s worth running a full virus scan, just in case.

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4 Wireshark

The best packet sniffer is free to use, but comes with a learning curve

While Windows 11’s built-in network monitor shows you an overview of which apps are using bandwidth, packet sniffers like Wireshark take things further, enabling a micro view of every internet packet going through your network adapters. While it’s not the easiest tool to pick up straight away, it’s become one of the best tools for IT and cybersecurity professionals, so there is a wealth of guides and other content to help you learn. Have you noticed that one of the apps on your PC is using way more data than you think it should be? Wireshark can help you drill down to why that’s happening, so you can make a decision on whether you’re going to keep that app or not, or report the bug to the developers.

Wireshark

Keep an eye on everything that’s connecting to your PC with Wireshark, one of the best network sniffer programs around.

3 GlassWire

For a more user-friendly interface with optional subscription

Another packet sniffer is GlassWire, which has a more human-readable UI, so it might be a better option for many. Unlike Wireshark, GlassWire groups network traffic together under the app that it’s coming from, but to see the deep details, you need to sign up for a $3-a-month subscription. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not really a drawback, as I’ll gladly pay for convenience when an app respects my time like this. It also comes as an Android app if you want to see what’s going on with your smartphone.

GlassWire

GlassWire monitors what’s using network bandwidth on your device, so you can figure out if anything is using more than it should.

2 Your router’s management pages

What better place to monitor your network from?

Consumer-level routers used to have a fairly barebones UI, but that’s changed recently. Most now come with some level of bandwidth monitoring or parental controls that also track usage per device. On the newest mesh routers, like Nest Wi-Fi or Amazon’s Eero, there’s a dedicated activity page that will show the overall bandwidth consumption, and also break it down for every device that’s on your network. Handy to see if your slow network is being caused by a misbehaving IoT device or if it’s because someone is downloading or streaming video all day and all night. Normal routers also have this, with Asus calling it “Traffic Analyzer” and TP-Link calling it “Traffic Monitor” and hiding it in the system tools menu.

While the other options on this list are designed to show which apps on a device are eating up bandwidth, monitoring from the router shows which devices are using the most. You should use both in concert to find out exactly which devices and apps are using the most, and then decide if you want to throttle the available bandwidth for that app, or if you can live without it entirely.

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Dig into what’s using bandwidth on your Mac

One of the best apps for Macs is iStat Menus, which puts a deeply customizable monitoring solution into the menu bar. While it can show everything from CPU and GPU usage to temperatures and the weather, it also adds network monitoring for all network connections. These can be shown as history graphs or current bandwidth use, and the apps using the most bandwidth get a broken-out view so you can find out what’s slowing down your connection for everything else. As a bonus, you can choose from a wide range of color options for the UI, and put as much or as little information as you want while it sits on the menu bar.

iStat Menus

Add deep system monitoring to your Mac with iStat Menus.

Finding out what devices are using your bandwidth isn’t a difficult task

More and more devices are showing the bandwidth used by apps and programs installed on them, and the best routers will have a monitoring page to keep track of everything that’s happening on the network. That means it’s fairly simple to find which devices and apps use more bandwidth than the rest, and thanks to features like

Quality of Service, you can adjust the bandwidth allocation to those devices accordingly, so the rest of your network gets the bandwidth it needs.

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