Python (Euro)DOCSIS (3.0) Traffic Meter

This tool uses a DVB-C capable video card (e.g. a cheap USB stick) to measure the EuroDOCSIS 3.0 traffic per frequency, allowing you to venture an educated guess about your local segment's utilization.

Data is written to a UDP socket in graphite format.

This was tested with cPython 2.7.13 and cPython 3.5.3 using a Hauppauge WinTV soloHD USB stick on a Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian/stretch.

It should however work with most Python versions as long as the DVB-C card is supported by your kernel and it's driver complies with the DVBv5 API.

EuroDOCSIS 3.0 uses standard DVB-C mechanisms to transport it's data: It's encoded as a standard MPEG Transport Stream on [PID] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_transport_stream#Packet_Identifier_\(PID\)) 8190 with either 64- or 256-[QAM] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAM_\(television\)) modulation with a symbol rate of 6952ksyms/s. Since cable is a shared medium, determining the total amount of data transferred and comparing this to the total amount possible after FEC (which is about 51Mbit/s for 256-QAM and 34 MBit/s for 64-QAM) will show you how much capacity is used.

No, you can't.

I wanted to learn Python.

You can easily use tools like netcat to capture the data.