How much bandwidth used by the program guide downloads?

General Discussion
1

Wondering how much bandwidth is actually used by the regular program guide downloads.
I understand, if this is correct, that initially there’s a 14 day (2 week) download of the program guide. That’s the biggest it would ever be if allowed to stay current. 
How much does that take, how “big” is it?

Then from there it does daily updates - is that correct?
What size are the daily?

I need to figure out how much bandwidth this is going to use since we pay per gig and have a bandwidth use ceiling for each month or billing cycle. 
Has anyone here tracked how large these program guide downloads are and how much they add to their monthly usage? 
I would expect not large but prefer to know just in case our usage jumps by a huge amount again like it just did this weekend. 
And these are first time, 14 days, then once a day to keep a constant 14 day fresh guide - is that correct? Or not?

Support says not very large and the “should be” numbers their tech support emailed me don’t sound bad but that’s not what they deal with daily so I can’t expect them to know really - I’d suspect some actual Tablo users can relate real-world numbers more easily. 


2

Would be interesting to know - not relevant for the general Tablo public. What router do you have? Some routers can track usage per MAC address.

3

Ha - right now it’s a ZTE hotspot giving me Internet access, not able to track use other than general and generic “you’ve used this much so far this month”. 


Even the Wi-Fi repeater doesn’t track that to my knowledge although it’s been a while since I’ve been into the interface on that thing as once it’s set up it just sits and works. 

I’m seriously considering a Netgear 4g LTE router, though, as the hotspot also limits me to 5 devices at a time for Internet access. 
4

I’ll reset my counter and report back in a few days. I would assume data required is somewhat dependent on how many channels are on your schedule.

5

And how many shows you record, etc. in terms of the posters

6

They could skip the posters. I’d prefer a “Detailed list”.
Anyone here who used or uses Windows and Windows “explorer” knows the differences.  I HATE the tiles. Hate 'em. (it’s one reason I refuse to use Windoze 8.xx,)
With 7 and explorer for file listings inside of folders I almost always do the detail view. I can then sort by file name or file date or time or size, etc. and more quickly find what I want.
I don’t choose tiles unless I’m looking for a photo and don’t know the timeframe/date or name of the image, THEN I’ll use the icons/thumbnails/tiles. Otherwise give me the NAME, date and time of a file. Same for the recordings. I’d be ok with a simple interface that didn’t show any photos of upcoming or recorded shows. 

That’s the one thing I don’t much care for about the Tablo interface, I don’t hate it like I do Windows tiles, but don’t give me a picture of the show and the show’s title, give me a list of show names, dates and times it was recorded. I don’t need a picture of it. Or at least let me choose to download the fancy photos or not. It’s similar for my music - I know some folks love the album cover art and all that, but I want a list of the songs and artists - skip the album covers. It just takes time. It’s a lot faster to not go look for pictures or album covers or the show art and I prefer speed over pretty.
I’m a very very visual person but I can instantly determine the show I want by the name, date and time, I can not determine that by a picture. I can’t use those pictures to tell me what show I want. 
(Frankly if there were an option to not use pictures of shows I’d choose that option right off the bat)
So - if there were the option to show and sort my recordings by NAME, date, etc. I’d take that over downloading all those fancy pictures all the time - and the TIME it takes to display those posters or pictures is a waste of time. If I had 15 episodes of a show (not that most shows even have that many in a season these days!) the picture won’t help a bit. A simple directory listing of the shows - giving the name of the show, the episode number in that season, and the date/time it was recorded I’d be thrilled. I’d get rid of the pictures and tell it to not waste my expensive bandwidth on the fun pictures.

In any case, we need to explain why after setting up the Tablo our Internet use jumped up so high pushing us close to the monthly limit 15 days before the end of the month. Something did and that’s all that was being done over the weekend. And that’s a whole lot of pictures in pretty high resolution. Even if pictures must be used how about cutting the resolution down, I won’t be printing them in photographic quality and they are temporary anyway.
It may not be the device at all but need to figure it out. 
(Computer and network forensics, it’s what I do.)

I was able to get the Netgear 4g router I mentioned earlier - for free.
So by the end of this week my equipment will all be off the hotspot with it’s limitations and we’ll access the cellular data network at 4g more often via the Netgear device thanks to the bigger and dual antenna. With 2 antenna and the ability to connect way more than 5 devices at a time and a better signal strength even for the Wi-Fi, it’s going to help us use more data and hit our limit more easily HAHA. 
It does cover almost the entire house without a repeater where the hotspot required a repeater to get end-to-end coverage of our house (not a BIG house but a lot of steel and electronics and such caused issues, all the fluorescent lights, the LED lighting, steel beam down the center of the house, etc. it was a lot of efi and interference from the steel.)
AND, it’s got 4 Ethernet ports so I can plug the new router into my Cisco switch and plug the Tablo into the Cisco switch and internally have device-to-device at 1gig speeds. Too bad Table can’t do device-to-device and requires internet, with it going through my Cisco switch it would SCREAM. 
So now I have a cell repeater with antenna up on the roof boosting and broadcasting voice in the house via an inside antenna so cell phones work better, the 4g router with dual antennas and Ethernet switch ports, a 10/100/1000 Cisco switch, Ethernet into every room (except the bathroom for some reason) and Wi-Fi that easily reaches the whole hours, we’re covered there. My shop has a shielded cable running out to it and I have a switch out there with a Cisco Wi-Fi access point so my home network extends to my shop for either Ethernet or Wi-Fi devices as well.
Cell phones can’t work in my all-steel shop building so I have a Bluetooth gateway in the house. Leave the cell phones in the house and they are connected to the phone wiring via the gateway and so I can answer cell calls in my shop through a standard cordless phone, and make calls using the shop phones and they go out the cell phones. Multiple ring patterns tell me which cell phone is ringing, mine or my wife’s phone so I only need to answer the phone in my shop if it’s my ring pattern. 
IF I can make Tablo work with the devices we have and somehow function sans-Internet like it does with iPad I’ll be set technology-wise until I decide to do something else (like a cat-cam to keep tabs on the cats while I’m away.)  

7

@ShadowsPapa 7 channels of guide data only uses 3.15 MB per day for me. I feel your pain with limited connectivity. The Tablo will only use “Internet” data for software updates, remote streaming and guide data after initial setup. Perhaps you have a device that isn’t connecting to Wi-Fi and is using the carrier connection. Shouldn’t be hard to figure being a Computer and network forensics guru.

8

Tablo support said that since I’m having to use the web app, the web app DOES require an Internet connection before you can access or use the Tablo. The device must go to the Internet, contact their server, get information on how to connect with the Tablo from their server. The Tablo goes online (INTERNET) to their server and tells their server who it is and what the IP address is, that way the web app can find it. They use HTML5 for the web app and for that their server is necessary. IT’s not really IF they built a web server into the Tablo itself! How do you think Cisco, Juniper and others do it with their devices? HP has a web server built into every network enabled printer so the browser can run the content. Java and HTML5 could be built right into the Tablo, they just haven’t done it yet. 
Everything else I operate, own, configure or maintain has its own built-in web server and runs JAVA or HTML5 so it’s just a matter of their catching up with technology. 
Juniper switches, routers, firewalls, etc. all run the same basic web server, all run the same OS and are all managed directly via browser with no Internet access needed, you go directly to the devices IP address. 
So now I know the REQUIREMENT for Internet is REAL. If you must run the web app, like I must since I don’t own any iPad or other Apple devices, then you MUST go to the Internet. 
If you access the Tablo device by using my.tablotv.com then you ARE using the Internet for Tablo access and if you unplug your router’s connection to the Internet then your Tablo will fail, too. It’s that simple. That URL is not in your Tablo, it’s their SERVER on the web and you are going through that to get to your Tablo. If you have iPad they have chosen to allow direct access, likely a JAVA-based app. Once they decide to include a WEB server on the Tablo device itself, then there’s no need at all for Internet except for the program guides.

It all makes sense since they explained that they use HTML5 and that the Tablo and your computer or other non-Apple device that runs the Tablo web app is indeed going through server to get to your Tablo device.

For us it’s about 20 channels and I have chosen to not include some of the others in Tablo as we don’t ever record them at all -or we could be 26 or 26 channels.
So for easy math, round that 20 to 21 and triple your 3.15/7 and get 9.45 for 21 (roughly!) channels or stations and we’ve be just under 10 meg/day. Times 30 days that’s 300 meg, since they collect logs and other information from us via that Internet connection to their server, 300 meg for 30 days plus logs, fancy hi-res photos or pictures or images which I could live without and would prefer to live without, it’s likely we’ll see 400-500 meg a month. Not terrible but if we had our plan we had last month of 5 gig a month, that’s getting up to 8-10% of our monthly allotment for Tablo. 
We’ve had to double it because so many other things are “insisting” on using the web these days and Windows updates suck up bandwidth each month (or just suck, depending on your point of view) we’ve had to up our plan to 10gig/month (the checking account screams ouch each month but that’s the modern world)
So at a figure of 500/month if it needs to grab a lot of big pictures (again, I wish it didn’t but that’s how it was chosen to make it), we’d be ok. On our older plan it would not be quite so ok. 
But in any case I’d strongly suggest anyone looking at Tablo STRONGLY review their Internet/data plans to see if it would support Tablo’s need for images. 
It’s simple - you need guide data - 14 days at first, then 1 day each day after that, and you need those fancy tiles and photos as it won’t display just a text list of recordings or TV shows. 
If you use the web app, and a lot of folks will have to if they aren’t Apple fans, then you must add a little bit for the necessary connection to their server to access your Tablo device on your network. 
I’m still going to put wireshark or even better, Microsoft’s network monitor app on my computers to see exactly what sort of traffic is involved with simple Tablo access, setting it up, programming shows and so on but if all they do is logs for your use and HTML5 I suspect that traffic is much the same as browsing any other web site for that same amount of time. 
9

Android tablet app lets you connect to the Tablo without a Live Internet connection as well. Tablet apps runs only on devices with screens 7" or larger.

10

Yeah, got that part but can’t make it go on a kindle Fire HD 8.9  (* and 8.9 is a little bit larger than 7" but it still won’t fly)

Guess I gotta buy a good used phone or a good used tablet to control and manage Tablo
That just GOTTA be better than firing up a computer, opening up Chrome, accessing Tablo over the Internet then choosing to cast to a Chromecast device. 

Tablo is fine and works quite well, it’s just the interface issues for those who aren’t Apple fanatics that’s lacking at this point. There’s not enough options as they have focused too narrowly on two products for that, IMO but then it’s not a mature product, either, with likely limited number of engineers or coders on staff so I can sort of understand the why of it.
11

When does Tablo use bandwidth? For instance if I have a recorded OTA show and are viewing it through ROKU on TV is bandwidth being used?

12

No Internet access is required to watch a recorded show or watch Live TV from the Tablo using a Roku. I verified this a couple of days ago when our connection went down for a couple of hours.

Trying to watch from a PC using a browser does not work because that method requires an initial connection to my.tablotv.com, however if you are already watching something from the Tablo in your browser it will continue to work and you can even select other recordings to watch and navigate the menus.

13

I assume you mean when does the Tablo use the internet.

  1. Downloading the guide data every morning (I assume the data is quite small).
  2. Using the web apps and web site to make the initial connection (very small).
  3. Using Tablo Connect for remote viewing (quite large, and it depends on your Tablo Connect settings).
14