Nicholas,

I mainly want to know who is using what package and how much traffic its generating. Would a firewall approach give me that ?

I know only the devices I allow are using the network so I don't think MAC address filtering would be useful.

My netgear router doesn't seem to have much in the way of monitoring

If u want to know who is into what, then a gateway firewall is the way to go. Check http://www.untangle.com out. This is what I use. Free. Open source. You only need a low-end PC like a 386 to do the job. Any of your existing PCs may be used as well. You can block, allow, set a lot of stuff.

Cheers!

Dennis