sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information DSL Slows to a Crawl in the Evening

My DSL slows to a crawl in the evening time. We're suppose to have 5 Meg Download and it works OK during most of the day. But, it seems every evening (starts around 3-5PM) it just slows way, way down.

When I run a speed test it will range from .3Meg to 3.5 Meg within a few minutes. I spent an hour on the phone with Embarq a couple of days ago and they acknowledged that we did have a problem and sent it to a tech.

The tech actually called back and said that he changed our DSL to "a different card and port." Of course we're stilling having an issue.

I've verified that this is an external problem by connecting my laptop directly to the modem and doing speed tests. Any suggestions on what I can tell the Embarq tech? (He was nice enough to leave his cell number.)

I had the same problem with my cable connection .

it would go out every afternoon for half hour or so and then intermittent slow periods

tech came out , checked it said everything was fine , while he was filling out paperwork I ran a speed test and it was crawling again .

he went down the street made some changes and its been good ever since

if there's any way to get them there when its happening that would help

hey nfc,
i work for a phone company that sells dsl and one thing we run into is the difference in speed test sites. also phone companies cant guarentee speed out side of their network. so if embarq has a speed test site test from there and compare the speeds to a speed test site out on the net like www.internetfrog.com

jonny

When the kids get out of school the band with seems to get a bit crowded...the games they play take a lot of space in the Internet world.

Think you'll find that after school let's out is when your problems begin. Then after dinner, guys like me jump on to look things up, order stuff, and go to their favorite web sight, like this one. Things slow down even more. Embarq's home DSL guarantee is for all practical purposes non-existent, and business is probably the same. So I still use dial-up and supposedly I'm connected @ 46,666, about 1/3 of home dsl speed. But it works all the time, the speed seldom varies significantly, and it is free! If I turn off the phone, then I won't have it, but I'll also be single and fighting with the dog for space. John C.

we used to see that with cable big time , slow way down after scroll early evening

i thought dsl was supposed to be immune to that , dedicated link to the dslam

Both technologies still use a "nodal" approach. Each node only has a certain amount of bandwidth available, and the carriers estimate load based upon the total number of subscribers and estimated usage. This is just like telephone companies equipping their CO switches with enough resources to handle normal calling traffic. When American Idol voting begins, you can't even call down the street wihout receiving an "all circuits busy" recording. We also had the same problem when dial-up was our only option and AOL's number was in the CO down the road from ours. All of the tie trunks between them were busy by 4:00 and nobody could call between the CO's.

Once enough complaints come in for slow speeds, they may take the action of splitting the node into two smaller ones and so on.

It's really not possible with older technologies to set up nodes with dynamic bandwidth allocation like newer systems can do. Customers paying business rates are given a higher level of priority in the node, but that's still not a guarantee. I am paying the highest package rate available for my cable modem service, and it still suffers during times when kids are likely to be on-line.

As others have already said, it really is a matter of the kids coming home from school and getting into their video gaming, music downloads and You-Tube video viewing that drags the system as a whole to a crawl.

We had a similar problem in LaLaLand about 4-5 years ago -- widespread, affecting everyone in in a central office, spread to several.

If you do a tracert your first report outside of your house is the Redback. (Mine is currently adsl-69-231-63.254.dsl.irvinca.pacbnell.net -- in 13 ms -- my Redback is in Irvine, 35 miles away from my Gardena Central Office.) The link from Gardena to Irvine is over the Telco's internal ATM network which, as far I understood it, had some sort of routing/overload problem. The symptom was a half second or more delay hitting the Redback.

At that point in time I was a moderator on dslreports.com and it was quite an issue. A user named "woofus" logged on, claimed to be a PacBell engineer. I verified him as being what he claimed, we fed him data for a month or so and he fixed the problem and got himself a promotion.

When you are running slow, is it due to latency to your Redback? Or is it in the network beyond the Redback?

Thanks for the replies! I kind of figured that it may have something to do with school getting out, but I thought that was not suppose to happen with DSL.

Now I'm getting 4.9 Meg download, but it's midnight and most people will have logged off. So, I guess I'll call the tech and see what can be done. They should not be charging me a premium for 5 Meg, if they can't deliver it most of the time.

Mike, I didn't look to see if the latency is coming from the Redback, I'll check on that when the problem happens again. I do know that there was a long delay in getting response from the name-servers.

-Larry

High traffic times and your provider not having enough pipeline to handle the load at peak times. That is exactly why I left my DSL and went back to cable.
The funny thing was that it me took about 6 calls to tech support, 3 months, and submitting 12-15 tracert tests to them before they would admit to it being their problem. The tech's answer (the equivalent of "must be somethin in yo PBX") was always to reboot my computer, router, and modem.