What's with the SOAP??

Ever since I had FIOS installed my PC is constantly transmitting and receiving data at a rate of about 8kbps in upstream and downstream direction. When I look at it in Ethereal it is SOAP (simple object access protocol). So I'm thinking OMG WTF!!! Anyone know what's going on?. The new firewall in my FIOS router has all the ports wide open, I used to keep them blocked.
Here's the Ethreal trace....I bet it's those sneaky bastards in Redmond.


POST /WANCommonInterfaceConfig HTTP/1.1

Content-Type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"

SOAPAction: "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:WANCommonInterfaceConfig:1#GetTotalBytesReceived"

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; UPnP/1.0; Windows 9x)

Host: 192.168.0.1:5678

Content-Length: 313

Connection: Keep-Alive

Cache-Control: no-cache

Pragma: no-cache



<?xml version="1.0"?>

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"><SOAP-ENV:Body><m:GetTotalBytesReceived xmlns:m="urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:WANCommonInterfaceConfig:1"/></SOAP-ENV:Body></SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

CONNECTION: CLOSE

CONTENT-LENGTH:471

CONTENT-TYPE:text/xml

DATE: Fri, 26 May 2006 01:09:53 GMT

SERVER: Embedded UPnP/1.0



<?xml version="1.0"?>

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"><SOAP-ENV:Body>
<m:GetTotalBytesReceivedResponse xmlns:m="urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:WANCommonInterfaceConfig:1"><NewTotalBytesReceived xmlns:dt="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:datatypes" dt:dt="ui4">-1568908290</NewTotalBytesReceived></m:GetTotalBytesReceivedResponse></SOAP-ENV:Body> </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

 

I'm familiar with the protocol. It's an XML object access protocol for distributed computing. In effect it is a common signalling language for apps to talk to each other across the internet. I can "invoke a method" on an object in your PC (i.e. tell it to do something), and it can reply to me with the results. SOAP defines the structure of the data.
You can see one of the "methods" being invoked in the trace ...m:GetTotalBytesReceived and then the answer coming back "1568908290" So my PC is chatting away happily with some application out there.