Internet slow at night, only night

[EliteMarine]

Hey guys, for the past week or so my internet has become increasingly slow, but only at night. At around 9:30 pm, my internet drops from about 4mbps to less than 1. In the morning it's perfectly fine. At first I thought it was just trouble with the cable company or something but the problem persists.
Any helps?

[Wickham]

You may be suffering from "throttling" by your ISP. The internet in UK is like the motorways, fast and open when first built but now jammed with traffic and temporary speed restrictions of 50, 40 or 30mph on the M25 for example. Your ISP may be throttling the bandwidth in the day and evening to spread the load over more people. I have a 8Mbps max and I can get 6Mbps in the early morning (I would not expect to get the max 8 miles from town) but from about 10am right through to midnight the speed gets much less, going down to 200kbps (0.2Mbps) at the lowest point, usually around 8pm. I think it starts when the US business day starts and gets worse later when the "gamers" start internet games in the evening which use video and consume a lot of bandwidth. Ask your ISP if they "throttle" or "manipulate" your bandwidth/speed.

Check at various times with
http://www.numion.com/YourSpeed3/ using the QuickStart link. It will show the speed for a single download from Numion's server in Holland and also the average surf speed when loading lots of small images from several places - this will be much slower and represents more typical surfing where images on a page come from various places.

[renegade600]

since it appears you are on cable, theres always a possibility that its just busy. With cable, you share bandwidth with everyone in the neighborhood. So if everyone in your neighborhood is online at the same time, then there will be problems such as what you are experiencing. That is one of the advantages dsl has over cable - no sharing