Yesterday I got one of those invasive, abusive, utterly awful (and idiotic) injected popups from Xfinity that I’m at 75% of my monthly bandwidth allocation. Nevermind the fact that I have a bunch of automated scripts running on my computer and injected HTML might never be seen by a human, or that I work from home and every once in a while I’ll find myself pulling and pushing multi-GB Docker images, which completely kills my 1TB bandwidth limit. But it’s only half way through the month and, frankly, I’m pretty mystified how I could have used so much data this quickly. I went to Xfinity’s site to check my usage meter - after rummaging around in my password manager to find my credentials - and realized that while it shows a graph of the past three months and a progress bar for the current month, it doesn’t show me any detailed (i.e. daily or hourly) data that would help me figure out the cause.
So, I wrote a little script using Python and Selenium to log in to their My Account site and screen-scrape the usage meter. Why Comcast would require me to log in to view my usage when I’m accessing their site from the IP address they gave me, on their network, I have no idea… unless it’s to provide a disincentive for customers to be aware of their usage. But I wrote the script, and it seems to be working. For the time being, I’m both pushing the results into Graphite so I can see usage over time, and sending myself a daily email so I can keep on top of usage.
Apparently Comcast used to have a desktop app to track usage but it’s since been completely shut down, along with the API that backed it (which an enterprising fellow reverse-engineered in this script). I can only assume this is another indication that, though the bandwidth cap was introduced citing “network performance”, they really don’t want people lowering network load (and avoiding fees).
I don’t remember anything about screen-scraping in the Xfinity terms of service - and if they’re f-ing injecting elements into my web traffic, I sure as hell hope they don’t complain about me checking my own usage - but use this at your own risk. Also be aware that it’s screen-scraping, so it may well break with a site redesign or element ID changes.
If anyone would find this useful, please see https://github.com/jantman/xfinity-usage.
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