Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
I know that back in the 1990's I had just gotten the brand "new" internet cable connection in the little town I was living in.
Before that it was 56K dial up. 
So I was super happy to have 1 MB download speed! It was like a whole new world opened up. lol
But they told me then that as more and more people got it...it would slow down like any other network and they would have to add more switches to get it back up to speed.
Maybe that's what happened with your local provider? They might not have been "throttling" you...they may have simply not have enough to handle the amount of bandwidth happening at the peak hours. And then after enough complaints, they went ahead and spent money to upgrade and fix your problem.
That's my theory.  |
I have no proof of this, I am just basing it on what I observed and heard from some people. I'm confident that they "oversold" the network and there were too many people on it so it slowed down during peak usage hours. I think they throttled users during that time to keep it from going down. The reason I think it was throttled is because of how my tests went. Every day I did four speed tests with two of them being during those peak hours and two being during other times of the day. I found that at 6:45pm I would get 50mbs or very close to it. At 7:10pm I would be at around 5mbs and it would stay that way until 10pm then at 10:10pm it was back up to 50. I suppose it could have been a lack of hardware and a need for an upgrade, but it just seemed fishy to me that it always happened at the same exact time every day. Also, when I called to complain and suggested this was what was happening, the support person I was on the line with immediately transferred me to his supervisor who promised it wasn't happening. After a second complaint and me emailing them a list of the speed tests, suddenly it stopped happening.
Maybe it still was hardware and they were throttling while trying to upgrade, but I have my doubts.
Either way, since it was "fixed" it has worked fine and I haven't had those issues.