Ridiculous internet speed capping.

[rockinliam]

I just did a couple of speed tests on my connection.

Before 5PM: 3.3Mbps
After 5PM: 0.3Mb

Seriously this cut means i am unable to watch youtube vids or play online games like Call of duty or Left 4 Dead. And its not like we are being capped because of excessive usage, all our ISP's have been the same. I think this problem is due to our line provider which we can not change. Not getting what we pay for annoys me very much.

[OldRod]

Is it being capped? Or after 5 pm are all the neighbors getting home from school/work and bogging it down?

I know at our office, when school gets out at 3 pm, our internet speed drops dramatically after that.

[rockinliam]

No its definitely capping i think its for everyone in the neighbour hood, and its always from 5 till 12 on the dot, and the speed doesn't seem change on sundays either Its really annoying

[Falken]

That sucks. I pay for 100Mbit/s down speed and 10Mbit/s up speed.

The fun thing is I get about 98Mbit/s up and ~35Mbit/s up speed...that is 3.5 times as high up speed than I am paying for
And this speed is 24/7

[Jackolantern]

No its definitely capping i think its for everyone in the neighbour hood, and its always from 5 till 12 on the dot, and the speed doesn't seem change on sundays either Its really annoying

Have you talked to your ISP about this? If not, how do you know it is capping? If you are using cable, your internet is shared. When I was on cable, my speed dropped by over 75% from about 4pm to 10pm, and it was not capped. It was just the huge impact of the neighbors on the internet. The speed would rarely drop on Saturday or Sunday, I would presume because people are doing other things, and little business is being conducted. Time-based capping just seems kind of odd to me.

[rockinliam]

Well before we moved house and changed ISP's, we got a letter saying that we had violated their fair usage policy and would cap our connection between the hours of 6 - 12 for a period of 3 months, now all this was resolved. but it shows that they do use time based capping.

[hallsofvallhalla]

DSL is the worst for this. Cable is pretty good about not losing bandwidth due to too many people using it. It also depends on the company you are using too. Not a lot of people know this but cable companies will allocate you on your average bandwidth a month.

Lets say you average 1 gig per week transfer rate. They will allocate you the bandwidth just enough to get it done, not cap your total but slow your speed. No lets say you leave for two weeks for vacation. This will cause your monthly usage to drop and they will also turn your speed down. It is actually automatically done using a data based Peripheral Gateway or PG. I have seen this done to myself and I often call them and say "My internet is super slow, can you send a boost?" and within seconds my speed is back to normal.

Next time it gets real low call them and complain.

edit: seen your last post, you need to look at the fair usage policy, doesn't sound legal to me.

[Jackolantern]

DSL is the worst for this. Cable is pretty good about not losing bandwidth due to too many people using it. It also depends on the company you are using too. Not a lot of people know this but cable companies will allocate you on your average bandwidth a month.

It is actually the opposite. Cable is a shared, pool-like connection. DSL's speeds are based on your distance from the CO, and not by how many people are on the connection at one time. Cable has faster speeds, but much less reliability in bandwidth. DSL can be nice if you are right next to the CO, as that means you will get constant fairly good speeds (although optimal DSL speeds are still only equivalent to lower cable plans). I use DSL right now, and don't get any swings in bandwidth at all.

@Rock:
Call them and see what is going on. Apparently they do have time-based capping, no matter how odd it sounds (particularly sounds odd as a punishment for fair usage violations)

[hallsofvallhalla]

Hehe thanks for that correction...mind was off somewhere else

DSL is the worst for this. Cable is pretty good about not losing bandwidth due to too many people using it. It also depends on the company you are using too.

should have been

Cable is the worst for this. DSL is pretty good about not losing bandwidth due to too many people using it. It also depends on the company you are using too, for instance large city DSL providers can max out at 8meg while smaller town DSL providers max out at 512k.

Download speeds are better for cable yet DSL seems to provide much better upload speeds.

[Falken]

Get fiber and everyone will be happy!

They are currently starting to offer 1Gbit/s fiber connections to customers in sweden now...earlier max was slow 100Mbit/s