My internet connection is via a fixed wireless connection using a 900MHz Motorola Canopy module. The router reports a fairly consistent 32-64Kbps of incoming traffic on the WAN port.

When I attached a PC directly to the port and run Wireshark, I get a dump showing a lot of chatter from other machines that I presume are connected to the same tower. This didn't include end-to-end traffic, but was there were a lot of ARP requests, SSDP traffic, ICMP and other network discovery type stuff.

Is this 'normal' or does it suggest a misconfiguration somewhere? As far as I can tell there is no need for my modem to be receiving any of this traffic (other than wanting to know what the names of my neighbours machines and printers are!)

Since the internet connection is slow at the best of time, having this amount of background noise seems very wasteful.