Why do internet connections get slow during rush hours?

[silvercats]

Is it becasue of the ISP's bandwitdth spread among many lines/people/clients ?

[almostbob]

yes, inadequate hardware

[silvercats]

I am kind of looking for a more detialed answer,technical .
thanks

[CimmerianX]

This depends on your type of installation.

Many cable companies and some fiber installs utilize shared bandwidth into an area. Imaging a 10 meg pipe into your apartment building (it's not really like this but just for explanations sake).

If you are the only person in the building using the service, you get all 10 meg.

If there are 20 people in the building all using the service, but you are the only one online, you still get all 10 meg.

If its 8PM and everyone is trying to stream netflix, now that 10 meg line is shared between all 20 people.

[silvercats]

what about the wireless technology? HSDPA. lookig for a detailed answer with more techincal explanations
thanks

[rubberman]

I am a performance engineer for a tier one mobile phone manufacturer in their web browser division. We run virtual mozilla browsers to fetch, process, render, and scale web pages for our users' mobile phones - millions of users all over the world. This situation (slowdown during peak hours) is not uncommon, and has many contributing causes, from the capacity of the phone company (carrier), to our capacity to process the users' requests efficiently, to the capacity of the web sites being accessed. Needless to say, Facebook, Twitter, and Google are those with the biggest loads (and pipes/capacity). But, all things have their limits! That is why we are studying ways to cache those most commonly accessed pages during busy hours so we can provide our users with the snappiest performance possible. We monitor latencies (time to get service and relevant data) at all links in the chain, from the handset to the carrier, to our data centers, to the target web sites, between our server components, and back to the handset, and we exert a LOT of effort to improve the experience continuously.

So, I think my point is, is that there is no simple answer here. Peak times == peak loads == slowest performance. That's just the way it is, unfortunately... :-( Sorry, but our quantum tunneling, time compression technology is just not yet ready for prime (or any other) time! :-)

[silvercats]

@rubberman . Can you give me a little more techincal details other than just words?
ex:- like 10 users connec to the local loop which has a bandwith of 100mb/ps it get devided under these rules etc.. these protocols are used
etc..... if possible with example calculatins too. thanks

[silvercats]

oh and let's assume that only possible reason to slow in this case is,too many users in the local bandwidth/node(or whatever). not the entire ISP or other reasons, like many peopple using the same LAN's bandwidth. like that what is going on the higer levels

[minimee120]

if you're sharing bandwith then it depends on how many people are using the Internet also. If you have your own seperate line, companies tend to have hours of the day where bandwith decreases substantially. Usually why your Internet is sometimes faster at 1AM opposed to 1PM. More people are online at 1PM then 1AM. If you have 100Mbps bandwith and you have 10 people its being shared with, then its 100/10. Each person is going to be getting 10Mbps bandwith (simple math). If you're on wireless, it could just be you're not getting as strong as signal, and suggest getting a signal booster, or installing your router elsewhere if possible.

[G_Waddell]

I think you are looking for a more complex answer than it really is, think of the Internet as a highway.

Generally at 5 am there are very few cars (data packets?) travelling down it and traffic flows freely where as at 5pm, there are more cars and the traffic slows.

The reason I say generally is because there are factors other than volume that can affect the flow too - using our highway example road works and road conditions, localised events etc.

There are equivalents of this on the Internet, for example when there is a concert or sports event local traffic slows down due to volume - Not all the highway is affected, but traffic in that area. A scenairo like this could occur around a particular companies website for example Apple annouce the launch of a new iPhone the Apple site becomes slow to respond because of all the traffic around it but other sites will be fine....

A large company using a web farm to host their website takes down a few of the farmed servers for maintenance, less access to site = slow down....

You're using a truck or bus (3G on your phone, Dial up) to get to your destination instead of a sports car (DSL etc)

[audrey110]

Just Due to the heavy trafic... Tremendous transfer of packets over a period of a time... and so many other things make internet slow in rush hours.

[maniat123]

due to poor quality or dying DSL modem internet connections get slow in rush hours.