What ChildOfThe60s reports sounds more like an intentional throttling, presumably done in an effort to avoid the more painful affects of excess contention for limited resources, such as crashing switches and extreme delays for even low bandwidth traffic.
It’s not a simple case of higher use on a shared node. For one thing I never had this until 2 months ago. The first thing I accused them of was overselling bandwidth, thus being unable to provide what I was paying them for. I was assured that there was no reason for that to happen, that there was more than enough to go around at peak hours.
Besides, it’s way too precise every single evening.
Another reason I say that is the provider has a speed test on their own server. I live in a town with 15,000 people and a 2.5 mile radius. Regardless of with the internet in general is doing at a given time, I should be able to pull most of my throughput anytime when I am a couple of miles from the server.
My ISP shares some lines with the city government, which is the major cable TV provider and much of the cable internet here. Yeah, the gummmerment.
Interestingly, my ISP says they have higher speed lines and capacity than the city, so logically the problem is somewhere on city hardware. They also are telling me that they can’t get the city to return their calls. Think government run health care folks.
My next step is to tell my ISP that I am going to pay for 1.5 meg service since that is what I am getting.
Unfortunately, my only other option is ATT DSL.