As a free service to Mac-using Thotzy readers, we offer TraffiX 2.0, an internet traffic rate monitor. If your ISP (like Comcast) is implementing or threatening usage caps on your internet service, you can use TraffiX to see if you are one of the “over-users” that they are bleating about.

TraffiX has only been tested with Airport Extreme base stations, but it uses industry standard SNMP techniques, and may work with other routers. If you try it with other routers, I’d be interested in the results, but I’m afraid I cannot offer any tech support.

TraffiX is a simple, one-window app. It presents a “level indicator” view of your estimated monthly usage, a total usage bar, and place to set the usage cap value.

Note that because TraffiX can only start gathering information when you first run it, the initial results may be wildly inaccurate. Just run TraffiX and then quit it and run it again in a few hours for a more realistic estimate. The more time you leave between runs of TraffiX, the more accurate its estimate is going to be. Read the helps for some caveats on this.

The Reset button simply starts TraffiX over as if you were running it for the first time.

TraffiX does not run anything in the background, or install anything on your Mac beyond the app itself. It doesn’t write anything to your router (just asks questions) and doesn’t save anything outside of its preferences file (in your Preferences folder, as usual).

There is a help window available that answers the most common questions about TraffiX, including whether you really need it at all.

TraffiX requires Leopard (10.5) or later.