I’ve been having to use time warner spectrum as they are the only company around. Totally fair, definitely not violating anti-competition laws. But I digress.
I can’t tell you how many hundreds of nights in my life I’ve had this issue. The internet behaves all day. Then as soon as it gets to be 11pm, 12pm and later suddenly that’s when the Netflix starts cutting out.
My landlord shells out for business class Internet on our apartment. There’s only 4 units and less than 10 people live in my building. I understand multiple people have multiple devices, but I would not expect bandwidth to be an issue at this time of night.
I used to think maybe my roommates are turning on porn via some onerous stream. But that can’t be it because it happens s even when I’m alone.
At this point, after this many years (about 3 total and the problem has persisted at 2 separate houses) I’m pretty well convinced they just throttle Internet at night. I’m not sure how that would save them money. But for the life of me I can’t think of alternatives.
Freeing up my WiFi from all of my devices does nothing as well.
I hate American Internet. I hate that providers act like they are gods gift to technology with their “blazing fast” 100Mb internet. I got news for you spectrum, that’s not even fucking close to fast.
If it’s every single night at that time I would suspect someone in a position to affect your connectivity has some automated service that uses the internet scheduled to run during that time period. That’s where I would start looking.
there are a million reasons.
on thursdays? your PC is downloading updates.
at lunchtime/dinnertime? neighbor’s microwaves are interfering with your wifi
after work? ISP is at capacity and most users experience slowness in your building / node
when you’re roommate gets home? he’s using it. netflix + dropbox syncing is enough to fully occupy 100 down and 15up for several hours.
when your fancy neighbor drives by? Tesla autopilot radar systems use 24Ghz which has a harmonic at 2.4Ghz which is home wifi
over on /r/sysadmin a few days ago they were talking about interference because a hospital up the street installed their new MRI’s shielding wrong
and to top it all off – in the States (except california) it is now legal for your ISP to make netflix run slower simply because they feel like it.
long story short go wired. also be aware if your landlord got “business” internet – that’s a buzzword my friend and means nothing without numbers up and numbers down. but you’re fundamentally asking a question that has an entire profession built around it. if there’s not an easy answer, then it’s a complicated one.
It’s called congestion, same as with the highways.
Hello,
I do not work for Time Warner, but I do work for a cable company.
While we do indeed perform maintenance in the “Overnight Period” we do not throttle for no reason…
Another fun point: Business Class Internet is not specifically faster than consumer grade… actually quiet the opposite. Business Class Service means you can get a dedicated IP Address, SIP accounts, and 24/7 support and a stronger SLA than consumer (For my company that means a tech comes out within 4 hours).
Regarding the bandwidth… it’s hard to say without knowing what your landlord is paying for - is he using 100/300mbps down? (highly doubt he’s paying for Gigabit speed). Knowing the speed of the connection would be a good starting point, as that can help to ID what could possibly be using up this much bandwidth. (There is a 25mbps connection but that’s DSL through Spectrum and… gross?)
Has your landlord reached out to Spectrum/Time Warner to address this issue? My other question would be what equipment is splitting the connection, and is everyone experiencing the slow speeds… and if you can run a speed test when the speed drops and before so there’s a comparison of how much speed you’re losing.
EDIT:
For those curious: Throttling occurs only when we discover Torrenting/Illegal streams AND a partner sends us a complaint… so use a VPN already.
If you can , open up the router’s login page, and see if the CRC error count is increasing or not.
I have issues with this. Unfortunately our technicians doesn’t even know what a ‘packet loss’ is . But you can troubleshoot the connection this way.
Advertised speeds are maximum line-speeds and assume a brand new copper/crystal cable, with no water damage, no traffic, no weather ect…
Call 911 on your neighbors and say they’re torrenting child Porn. Easy solution and easy fix to your speed issues.
The only possibilty could be my new upstairs neighbors. My landlord sent out several accusatory texts as someone was torrenting movies and he was questioning everyone in the building about it. I told him frankly I havent torrented since like 2013 (the whole torrent gig really got a lot harder whenever pirate bay went down the first time).
But I’m positive it is the new neighbors because the only other people are middle aged adults and my roommates don’t torrent.
As far as setting up automated servies…it’s quite possible they are downloading overnight as they sleep and railroading the internet for the night owls in the building. However I’m not computer savvy enough to…idk I guess break into their computer remotely to confirm as such? We are all on the SAME internet connection, is there a way I can see what sorts of devices are hooked up to my address and what sort of usage those devices generate?
Man, it’s 2:19am. I do live in a city…but come on.
Exactly how much service is being used at this time compared to the middle of a business day? This shouldn’t be an issue in the slightest but ISPs are just the scummiest fucking companies.
It takes a massive set of balls to call your internet blazing fast in a country where municipalities are getting Terabyte internet. Or a World where an entire continent of europeans are getting better internet.
Just to really piss in my face, my playstation 4 even says everything is fine with the internet! but both netflix and hulu constantly freeze, then slap me with a barrage of HTP-900 errors.
Thanks I wasn’t expecting a solution so much as an explanation or to learn something about WiFi. And you certainly provided a lot of interesting stuff, some obvious and some very insightful. Like the tesla and MRI machines? I’m happy to have learned that.
I try and go wired as much as I can but I only have one port in my room and my laptop is top bitch in my world. So it gets the closest spot and is always on a hard connection. I don’t have a cable long enough to neatly wire my ps4 into it…maybe I have a weekend project? It’s not like those cables are expensive and it may just save my temper.
I sadly have no control over the torrenters and doubt they are savvy enough to subscribe to a VPN. My landlord did recieve a letter that’s why he cared in the first place but I doubt they would toss him off as a customer as he pays spectrum for this internet in multiple buildings he owns.
Last night I had my playstation test the speed and it came back with a paltry 23Mb down and I think about 11 up. I haven’t spoken to him about the internet bc it really seems out of his control and like many are saying here, there could be many factors to this.
It’s illegal to file a false police report. I didn’t post this to r/shittyadvice
See if your landlord can either block or throttle back the torrent traffic via whatever router is currently installed.
QoS is the common terminology in the router configuration for throttling. Other terms used for throttling are throttling, traffic management, traffic shaping, bandwidth management, bandwidth control, traffic control.
QoS isn’t a perfect solution, especially on home routers, but it does help considerably if properly configured.
EDIT: I can’t advocate for hacking into their computer as that is generally against the law to do so.
If it is all wireless networking you could, theoretically, use airodump-ng from the aircrack-ng suite or Kismet to sniff the wireless network traffic and see which devices are transmitting what amount of data. It would require an aircrack-ng compatible network card and a little bit of know-how/studying into the matter.
Have you tried talking to the neighbors that you suspect might be consuming all of the Internet connection bandwidth? I have found that just a civil, friendly conversation in situations such as this are the absolute best solution. It could possibly afford you the opportunity to confirm that they are doing the suspected activity. Perhaps suggest that they alter their scheduled download to a time later at night. If you do that, don’t pry into what they are using the Internet for at that time, just pry enough to confirm that they are and then just let them know that it is impacting your enjoyment of the Internet at that time and politely ask if they could adjust the schedule. You’d be surprised what some polite and civil conversation with a smile can accomplish.
Basically wifi frequencies are licensed by the FCC along with everything else that uses radio waves. There are certain general use frequency bands where wifi and consumer electronics live (as opposed to reserved for military, am fm car radio, antenna TV, etc). Everything is competing for the same general use space and interfering with each other be it cordless phones, other wifi systems, microwave ovens, tons of things. If you’ve ever poked around in your wifi settings you’ll see many different bands of wifi to choose from to slightly alter the frequency to try and find good signal.
It’s worse in cities, and worse still near universities, airports, or hospitals. Places with their own large scale electronics and wifi that could cause interference.
To combat this companies that make wifi routers have been sticking on more and more powerful and even alternate frequency antennae, but that’s just the equivalent of yelling louder in a room that used to be quiet but now is noisy.
It’s sort of a losing game. I use a wired connection at every opportunity possible. Just makes life easier and if something goes wrong or slows down, at least I know it’s probably on the ISP side.
I mean… heres the thing: 23mb down should be plenty fast for the vast majority of use cases (sans 4k straming).
If you’re getting slow performance this might be a case of degradation in the wifi signal or another very odd connection interference (or ingress from some kind of equipment).
I know you do not own this connection but have you tried running a long term ping test to see if you’re losing packets?
Ping www.google.com -t
The above command will ping until you tell it to stop (ctrl +c) and then give you a % of dropped packets. You should have none. I’d there are dropped packets than an issue exists between you and the cloud. Could be the router itself, the modem, or possibly the signal to the modem from Spectrum (it’s rare, because we do monitor for this sort of thing… but it can happen at times.)
I was joking. Kind of posted that comment when I was out drinking lol
I like that you actuslly addressed my amateur-level plan with an applicable solution. I’ll almost certainly never do all of that but I love computers. I’ve fixed a lot of minor issues myself, and it’s nothing impressive but I would think a majority of people would first turn their computers over to a store at the first sign of trouble.
I’ve been getting really into scam bait videos where the people run a virtual machine with fake personal information saved to desktop then get the scammers to take those as bait. One guy used a program that overloaded the call centers phone bank. It seems like what they do is quasi-legal but I doubt any American court will prosecute a national for destroying a scammers computers in India. I really get interested in the technical stuff of computers but a lot of the time it is written at too high of a level, but I’d say I’m more computer literate than the average bear.
Back to the matter at hand, I’ll try snd mention it if I see them. They are all young professionals and work the 9-5. I’m almost always in school until the early evening then library beyond and frankly I don’t see them much but your second but of advice about a kind discussion is very good as well.
Thanks for the explanation. The best advice so far seems to be use a wired connection whenever possible. I’m going to look into wiring a hard cable over to my ps4
It’s just inconvenient because I have to wire it up and around my bedroom door and there Is already a coaxial cable occupying that space.
Maybe I can get the coax out of the way? Then actuslly I can use the mounted brackets the coaxial is hooked into to keep it flush to the wall.
The thing is I don’t want to just loop an ether net like a slob, I too subscribe to the “clean cable” school of thought.