My mom who lives in a rural area had few options after the last local DSL provider closed up shop. She was limping along on a slow network connection over an old cellular modem. I suggested she try an Android 5G phone as a hotspot, because I found my own phone had a much better data rate with mobile data at her place, than her old setup did. She managed to get that set up. I assumed that the so-called "unlimited data" which is actually a 25 GB/month data plan would be enough, because what she does is: "mostly email, reading newspapers, playing a Words-with-friends and a crossword per day, sending photos to the computer to print".
So it turns out when she checked her Tello phone plan after a few days of use, that it shows a usage of roughly 1500 MB each day (!) That is _way_ more than I expected given her typical use. There is her computer and a printer connected to her phone wifi hotspot. Is it possible the wifi-connected printer is bouncing the whole print job to the network and back- surely not? How do you track that down? Her computer is a 2021 iMac. The hotspot phone is what Amazon called a "refurbished" Samsung Galaxy A32 5G on Android 11. The phone thinks it's fully updated, despite Android 12 being released for it, making me think maybe it was not originally a US model or something like that. Did the phone come stocked with malware that's busy downloading ads, or running a TOR network etc. in the background?
I'm not a mac person. Does the current macOS have something like a data odometer that keeps track of the total # of MB sent and received over the network, which is wifi in this case?
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