10
1
My question is a bit general but I assume there has to be a good, specific answer to my problem.
I, like many, am beginning to wonder if my ISP is throttling my home internet connection. I'm not so quick to judge because throttling accusations are often unwarranted or unsupported and often seem a bit conspiratorial in nature. I'm not yet ready to make that conclusion.
In my case, my wife and I get our internet through our cable provider, and we have the top-tier, home-based offering for our area. We have found that very consistently, our ability to surf the web between 12:30PM and 2:00PM completely disappears. I understand that this is typically lunch time but, from what I can gather, this isn't considered peak time. Furthermore, we often stream Netflix in the afternoon during what is certainly peak-usage times (8:00PM-10:00PM) and we never have any trouble.
If this is an issue with network load, we should have trouble in the evening, not in the early afternoon.
What could be causing this mid-day bottlenecking? This happens every single day, and it happens on every device (we have over 7 phones, tablets, PCs, etc. and they all have the same problem.) Could this realistically be an issue with ISP throttling? Could it be something else and are there steps that I can take to personally troubleshoot or diagnose the problem?
Regardless, this is extremely annoying and I'd like to do a bit of personal troubleshooting before I call up the ISP and ask them for a bit of customer service. Our ISP's customer service is horrible and they've never been of much help. If I am going to try and confront them on this issue, I would like to know as much as I possibly can about the nature of the problem.
Any tips, strategies or pointers from those who are well informed would be much appreciated.
Any updates? Have you solved the problem? Can you tell us what were the results of ICSI Netalyzr and trying Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi at lunchtime? Curious minds would like to know.... :) – allquixotic – 2012-08-15T14:09:01.793
allquixotic: Sorry for no response. I haven't abandoned this question but to be able to test out a few things, I need to be home when the problems occur. I work away from the home during the day, so I probably won't be able to update this post/mark an answer until this weekend. – RLH – 2012-08-15T14:31:51.890