Even though my NBN satellite box is off, my ISP portal shows data usage in the range of 10-20megabytes per hour. this is what they told me is the cause. To me, it sounds like crap. They've even told me it would be the same if I change ISPs. Can anyone shed any light on the way the NBN dishes out ip addresses as I think this is the only way I can sort this out.

"Our engineering team has detected the 2 protocals that see data usage during the times we had the SNTD turned off and previously when the router was turned off were 1. ICMP which is ping traffic and 2. Torrent protocols, as we have discovered when a torrent establishes a session it updates your public IP address to the session and shares the IP address to other peers in the session. Where the extra data usage comes from is when these peers are pinging your service to establish a connection with you to receive the requested data on the torrent.

My engineers have advised the only way to stop this happening is to stop the torrent session and remove it before you turn your equipment off and after the files have finished downloading. Unfortunately we cannot advise as to which device the torrent is establishing the session on or which torrent program it is as we are not allowed to record of view that data as we would be in breach of the Australian privacy laws."