Why is my internet slower at night?

It's DSL.

The more people on (your node), the slower it gets, that's how Digital Subscriber Lines work.

 

Peak usage in Canada according to most ISPs in between 8:00pm and 1:00am.

As well as the number of users online on your node, the distance you are from your ISPs central routing station also comes into play with DSL. The further away you are the slower you're going to be with less traffic.

Check this link for diagnostics and a rating of your service:

http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/

 

More guys are surfing the car forums at night while the wife is in the shower and getting the kids ready for bed

 

I notice the same thing slower at night and I have a high speed cable modem by Comcast.

 

All the pRN users..

 

No, I've been busy this past week

 

That's what the internet is for: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5430343841227974645

 

+1 That's what my brother does, but after he pervs on his wife in the shower

 

Probably the same reason my sprinklers work poorly at night, everyone else has theirs turned on too

 

pAp you have SpRNKlrs?

 

Cable modems are the ones that use neighborhood nodes, whereas DSL is a direct connection back to the central office. Some people say that makes DSL better, and less prone to local bandwith hogs, but I've never seen a lot of proof of that, and I've had both, with different carriers. Everything ends up on some public network anyway, and with so many things being cached, I don't know that a person would see web surfing between the two that much different.

 

I have the same equipment / service and had the same problem yesterday morning for about 4 hours. That happens once in a while and you just live with it! Overall, their service through the 2Wire hub thingy is pretty decent.

 

I work in the biz, and the reason your slow is because everything is overbooked, its primarily the router that runs your local area thats flogged, all the big boys, sbc, verizon, comcast, they all overbook by around 200% or more, they try to have the capacity for average use if it gets to slow or enough folks complain they add capacity to your area. the congestion when tons of subscribers are on is the problem, and they are always selling more and more bandwidth to customers. the problem is the routers, and switches can only take but so much. if the switch is overloaded you just wont be able to get online, if the router is overbooked youll be slow, if its severe it crawl, of course there are all types of other network elements that could be down, cards can fail in the equipment and so forth. the main difference between the last hop copper based internet providers is just the last hop, for cable its the shielded twisted pair, and for the telcos the unshielded twisted pair, verizons fiber will trump that last hop though. but all the inter-office stuff, and all the facilities backplanes have been fiber for years. the ATM networks and such.

(i should add that the average user dosent normally use more than 50% your average website rarely gives you more than 200k in bandwidth to surf the site with. and folks arent always home so the 200% number has some basis in reasonable facts, also over a 24 hour period that use goes way down to near 0% most of the time. the problem comes when tons more users log on during peark use hours and network capacity is growing slower than average consumer bandwidth use and speed packages offered, so now companies are giving folks 3-5M on the regular and for the file sharing guys, and mass emailers they use near 100% of that bandwidth all the time that leaves everyone who just wants to look at the internet or send an email out in the cold sometimes. think of the total bandwidth the isp offers sort of like electricity you only want to have the bandwidth (electricity), that the demand needs, with some overhead )

the short answer is there isnt much you can do about it. any dsl provider is leasing equipment from sbc/verizon etc.., any cable provider is probly leasing comcast, or whatever your big boy company is. then you have your tiered providers. and i dont mean the speed you get but how your isp is jacked into the GSP (global service provider) verizon and sbc for instance are teir 1 which is the best, I imagine comcast may be too. stuff like covad and other weird things may be teir 2 or lower, thats where they jack into someboy elses, who jacks into somebody elses, who jacks into sbc or verizon, who then jacks into the GSP. the cost and complexity of the equipment involved keeps the smaller isp's leasing not designing their own networks.

and all this is before you talk about GSP network bandwidth, or the number of hits or, bandwidth availiabe to the server you are hitting, of course the only reason its quick at all is the local DNS and everything they have cached there, your ISP does all that and its transparent to you, but of course those servers can go down too. the internet is by no means an easy or simple network to navigate, its honesly amazing data ever gets where its supposed to.

the easy answer though is that your local comcast network, may have less congestion than sbc. but even if they do its no gurantee, that GSP trunks arent clogged as all holy heck at night, most of the stuff inter isp goes OC3 interoffice but once you hit the GSP you hit alot bigger fiber pipes but they are only but so big, one tunnel fire in baltimore crippled the internet on the whole east coast.transatlantic communications are out of virgina primarily so everyone in the north east had to go thru much smaller pipes. and long hops to get around the damage, going down much smaller fiber around the beltway. trying to ram say even just one OC192which is 9.6Gbps, down an OC3 which is 155Mbs you get the idea

meh i could talk forever about it. I'll leave it at that, I hope something i said helps.

 

Kompressor knows, I think Ghostrider is wrong.
During the day most businesses have commercial lines, T1 or T3, and there is not a lot of traffic on the 'home' (neighborhood) nodes.

Komp, another thing to worry about is train derailments, because a lot of the trunk lines are owned by Level Three/leased by Sprint, and they parallel Union Pacific railroad routes.
About 4-5 years ago there were two major outages traced to train derailments near Atlanta, and KC, in both cases the trains wiped out the lines for a few days, it was sloooow while they were redirected. I have not kept up with outages since then at all.

 

Well I think Kompressor is mostly incorrect...but hey.

To put it simply: it's normally either oversubscription or an alternate path that isn't optimal.

Sometimes it's great...and sometimes it's not.

 

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem):

"DSL uses dedicated rather than shared cabling, and DSL customers in a given neighborhood do not to appear as nodes on a LAN."

DSL Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/faq/7135):

"...nodes are the common aggregation point for all the cable signal traffic in a particular neighborhood. This means all users connected to one node share the bandwidth available to that node."

 

not quite so easy though - cable is much higher shared bandwidth than DSL's lower "dedicated" bandwidth. But it all goes to heck once you get down your street to the nearest POP anyways. Then all performance is based on how high your ISP's revenues need to be, and how low their costs need to be, to keep the CEO's options in the gravy.

We're able to buy some additional "quality" from our ISP for an additional $10/month which gives less slowdown, better VoIP quality. I think I'm paying for the CEO's oil change on his Bentley