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.
Best Answer
ICSI Netalyzr is the gold standard for analyzing what nasty things your ISP may be doing to your internet connection. But also keep in mind that many problems are related to your "endpoint devices" (DSL/cable modem, etc).
Also check if you have any background programs that do a daily upload of a lot of data, like Steam syncing to the cloud (although that's not daily), Dropbox, or something like that. Saturating your upstream can obliterate your downstream, which would do exactly what you described. This is because of the TCP ACK stalling problem, which is present in every single endpoint device with an asymmetric link (less upstream than downstream or vice versa) and which doesn't have Controlled Delay Active Queue Management implemented (CODEL is a very new technology that just appeared this year, so consumer devices are practically guaranteed not to have it).
You might also have issues if someone in your neighborhood routinely does something at the same time every day, like if they vacuum, or cut the lawn, or turn on a sprinkler, or try simultaneously downloading 100 torrents, or something like that.
You'd be amazed how little it takes to interfere with a cable connection. And 99% chance it's not intentional.
TL;DR:
Edit/update: Are you also on Wi-Fi? :) Wi-Fi is bad; if you are using it, stop using it! It's 100000 times easier to disrupt Wi-Fi (intentionally or not) than it is to disrupt a cable in the ground. Microwaves, cordless phones, vacuum cleaners, and almost any other electronic appliance or device can carelessly spew electromagnetic pollution on the unlicensed Wi-Fi bands, either because that's part of its operation, or because the designers were lazy and didn't measure/control EM emissions from motors or sensors within the appliance. The unlicensed bands have an incredible amount of "noise" -- some of it extremely "loud" -- being flung all over it at any particular time, from countless sources. So stop using Wi-Fi and your problems will probably go away.