I am trying to figure out what is causing an increase in my bandwidth usage as measured by Comcast. Prior to April my usage was generally around 200GB. In April it went up to 300GB. The first four days of this month (May) it was about 50GB putting it on track to be about 390GB. One of those four days a third of our devices were disconnected from our router and our activities were minimal. (Carpet repair going on.) The other three days we did nothing out of the ordinary. I see no way to isolate the bandwidth usage through our router so I have been racking my brain for anything that is different. One thing that is different is that I installed Norton Security on April 5 on one of my computers. After determining that it was OK, I installed it on my other 2 computers on April 17. I did not check the bandwidth usage; it never occurred to me that it would increase significantly. Identity safe is off on all computers; I do not use the cloud or vault on any computer. I have NS without backup.
Is it possible that two computers running NS can account for the April bandwidth increase given above (one computer running NS most of the month and two other computers running NS about half of the month each)?
After reading other posts today, May 5, I opened NS and it was set to Network Cost Awareness = ON; Policy = No Limit. I changed the latter to Policy = Economy. It disturbs me that I cannot evaluate whether NS is the cause of the increase in bandwidth because I can find no clear explanation of the impact in functionality changing this setting has on NS. For example, what is the effect on updates or update frequency? Also, what is the impact of changing this setting in numbers? For example 30% (50%, 80%) decrease in bandwidth usage by NS.