Sunday Evening, the New Web Rush Hour 88
Barence writes "For anyone who assumes weekday evenings are the worst time to enter the online scrum, it may be a surprise to learn that the peak internet rush hour, when average web speeds slow to a crawl, is in fact Sunday between 5pm and 6pm. This surprise fact came out of Ofcom's recent research that also told us the blindingly obvious news that actual broadband speeds are less than half of those advertised by the ISPs."
Re:The speed thing alwasy pisses me off (Score:5, Informative)
Back when I had Verizon's 3mbit DSL my speeds would be relatively close to the promise. Sure, some websites could max out quickly, but overall I was close to my limit. The same would go for if I downloaded multiple files simultaneously, their combined speed would be close to 3 mbit.
Now with Verizon Fios, I am once again hitting my speed (or very close to it) more most of my downloading.
Re:The speed thing alwasy pisses me off (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike cable, with DSL the bandwidth between your house and the CO is not shared with your neighbors. If that's where the problem is, the phone company may be able to fix it.
If the problem is between the CO and your ISP's POP, well, that shouldn't happen - it means the LEC screwed up pretty badly somewhere.
If the problem is between your ISP and the Internet, then your ISP sucks ass and you should find a better one. Your phone company probably doesn't advertise this fact, but most likely, it is possible to choose from many local ISPs. Again, this is unique to DSL.
Re:For those who didn't read the second article (Score:3, Informative)
Fully concur with your first paragraph - the summary doesn't mention that key fact; the article is about British telecomms only.
How that leads into your second paragraph, though, is quite beyond me. Whoever posted (or edited) the summary was stupidly vague, but the article itself - and the reporter - is quite clear about the location of the services in question, even though it's a UK tech-site to begin with.
I'm not suggesting reporters on this side of the pond never make the arrogant mistakes to which you allude, but I'd say the article refutes rather than supports your posit.