Hi Guys, we are working with several of these units and are using cellular connection to transmit the sensor data to our server. We have noticed that the amount of cellular data being used by the gateway does not match the amount of information being generated and transmitted to our server. Do these units use the cellular data links for any other use other than the specified data transmission?
For example, on a typical unit we are receiving 40KB/day into our server, however, the gateway is using over 200MB during the same time frame. We are trying to determine what is going on here and would appreciate your feedback. Thank you.
What protocol are you using to transmit the data? Some protocols like HTTPS have a fairly high data overhead for headers and encryption negotiations per byte transmitted.
There is a health check that pings out to a couple of DNS servers to check the health of the Gateway’s internet. It can be disabled or extended or you can customize the endpoints.
There’s also the NTP server to update the system clock.
I forgot to mention that any devices connected to the Gateway will, by default, attempt to use its cellular data. This generally applies to device connected to the Gateway directly via its AP or ETH1.
I concur with @jacob and my assumption for high data usage is a client connected to the WiFi AP of the Gateway. I would highly recommend disabling that in the gateway’s configuration. Also as he mentioned you could disable the health checks in the configuration as well.
You can disable Internet Sharing by going to the Web Configuration Dashboard (port 80) of the Gateway. Then Network > Firewall > Zone Forwards section. Click the X icon to the right of both internal_to_eth0 and internal_to_external. Click Submit on the bottom. Click the Red Checkmark at the top.
To disable Health Checks go to the Web Configuration Dashboard again and go to Network > WAN. Click the edit icon next to WWAN for cellular. Scroll Down to the Health Detection Settings in the Modal. You can completely turn off this feature by just disabling it via the Enable field or customize the options to reduce how often this is checked. edit Click Submit after making the desired changes and after the modal closes click the red check mark along the top of the page.