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."
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The speed thing alwasy pisses me off (Score:2, Insightful)
It sounds like there is a problem with your line. Call them up and bitch. If it's a problem, they might be able to fix it and get you the full 3Mbps. If the line is fine, that's all they can deliver you. You might as well switch to a lower tier. No point paying for 3Mbps, when you're only getting about 1.
Re:Kids (Score:4, Insightful)
1 person watching youtube videos could probably outdo 25 people surfing around for school.
Mom: Tommy, go do your homework!
Tommy: Okay Mom!
Tommy then sits down on the computer and watches Youtube.
Not News to Ebay or TV watchers (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, not just the kids. The whole family.
"Primetime is Sunday between 5pm and 6pm" is not news to Ebay sellers or people who watch TV ratings. The reason why virtually every network or cable channel schedules their best shows on Sunday night is because almost everyone is at home that evening. Take Sci-Fi Channel for example. Or FOX. They moved Battlestar Galactica and X-Files from Fridays to Sundays, because they knew they'd get more eyeballs.
And Ebay sellers have known for a long time that Sundays net the most auction views. I schedule my auctions to end 9 p.m. Eastern/5 p.m. Pacific because I know I'll get the highest number of bidders during that time, and therefore higher sale prices.
Re:The speed thing alwasy pisses me off (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you getting that number from your web browser? Both IE and Firefox express speeds in KiB/s (bytes, and in base 2), whereas network line speeds are expressed as bits per second, in base 10. 3Mb/s is 3,000,000 bits per second, 375,000 bytes per second, 366.2KiB/s.
That's still a far ways between your numbers, but it does explain some of the difference. There is some protocol overhead at various levels to deal with, but those are relatively minor. Your best option is to use something like SPeakeasy's speed test [speakeasy.net], which will test your speeds, and report back in Kb/s (bits, base 10), and take protocol overhead into account, to see if you're actually getting close to advertised speeds. That way you're not comparing apples to oranges.
(If you are actually getting 50 kilobits per second, I am sorry, both for making assumptions, and for your sub-56k modem-ish speeds.)