Alex, thanks for yet another personal account of this phenomenon. I call it a phenomenon because the causality is yet unclear in its totality.
Sure, there is the factor of added usership during those hours of the nite which tends to congest the last mile, and it does bring down speeds noticeably. I've made that point here and elsewhere myself.
But in fairness, there are other factors that are at work internal to the cloud due to the same onslaught that takes place during those times, and these tend to mask each other when it comes down to allocating blame, percentage-wise.
The links from the facilities-based head-end providers get strained looking towards the core, the router ports at the next level up are over-working, as well as link sizes and other resources right up through the Internet's Network Access Points [or, NAPs] at these times of the day.
It's impossible to be too precise in assessing responsibility on a proportionate basis across these resources without actual measurements being made at each point. Even then, it's far from being a no brainer.
In general, the burden is shared across the board, and it is felt more so by most cablemodem systems than other forms of what could be considered "dedicated" access methods, but the exact percentage of ownership of the blame is difficult to assess in absolute terms. One thing is for sure, though, and that is that subjective assessments by users will mean a lot here. |
