What causes cable internet to be so slow sometimes? I’m not trying to download anything…just casual net surfing, and yet…it can be so dang slow! Why?
Maybe I am over simplifying the whole thing on how it really works?
- Jinx
It could be your evil neighbors downloading a lot of stuff and using up the bandwidth. It could be the website you are going to is sending the stuff slowly. Because web site is just slow or perhaps it is popular the the evil other users are taking up the bandwidth.
Probably the first option. Cable crows about its much higher bandwidth over DSL but what they neglect to tell you is you are sharing a line with other people in your neighborhood. Sadly cable companies will often over subscribe and as a result you see notably worse performance during peak usage hours. DSL is generally slower than cable but your bandwidth is your bandwidth.
If it was just the website that was being dodgy that should be apparent by surfing other places. If they are all slow it is probably your connection and not them.
Could be your computer too. Be sure to clear the cache every so often (run Disk Cleanup under START>PROGRAMS>ACCESSORIES>SYSTEM TOOLS [assuming you are using Windows XP]).
Most likely your neighbours are using lots of bandwidth at the time. Cable internet is shared, so if some are downloading a lot than the internet will become slower for others. Cable companies don’t currently use equipment to help keep bandwidth use fair AFAIK.
If you’re seeing specific sites(say, the SDMB) go slowly than it’s a problem on the site’s end.
You are always sharing a line. That is the whole point of a packet switched network. The DSL lines are shared as well. The sharing just happens with a slightly different topology.
Of course eventually we all share data pipes somewhere along the line. The question is where along the line do you get aggregated onto a single line. For DSL I have a certain amount of bandwidth from myself to at least the nearest sub-station. For cable I may be sharing a line with dozens of people in the same building.
Kind of like the difference between being connected to a switch or a hub. The switch separates out traffic and each user has a dedicated bandwidth to that switch (say 5Mb/s). On a hub everyone shares 5 Mb/s. If you have 20 computers on that hub all 20 split that bandwidth. This is why switches are preferable.
It possible that the OP is experiencing latency problems rather than general slowness. I have cable and found that the default DNS server was poor. One solution is to use another DNS server that provides quicker lookups. I found that OpenDNS works well for me. It’s free and very simple to set up - they provide the instructions you need.
I switched from DSL to cable about a year ago (mostly because the Telco is clueless) and noticed that by and large the cable is faster, but there are times a day it definitely slows down. Since this is what I expected, I am not concerned, but it does happen.
See, the internet is a series of tubes. Sometimes, the tubes get clogged and your internets can take a long time to get to you.
