Cable Speed

[JBH1876]

Using Charter with 5 meg service......... Tonight had an issue with speed dropping to 1 meg.... Contacted CS, and they wanted to set up a service call to check modem....... In short does cable have issues such as this with high traffic?

[Steve R Jones]

Try pulling the power cord out of the modem for Five minutes and plug it back in and test.

[SpywareDr]

Cable modem services share bandwidth among subscribers in the same locale.

Since the same cable line that connects to you also connects to many other households around you, if many of your neighbors are accessing the Internet simulataneously, the cable speed for you, and them, will decrease significantly.

[Welshjim]

JBH1876--
How did you determine the lower speed? The speed offered by your ISP is usually the max their servers are capable of. But if you were downloading a file from another site, then that site's servers also get into the act. If their download speed is only 1Mbs, then that is the download speed you will get.

Having said that, cable service providers generally do not offer much help in optimizing download speeds for their customer's PC's. You may want to go through the analysis and tweaking here
http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks

And it is possible that the wiring, connections, etc., from Charter's connection box on the street to your house are deteriorating. So perhaps it is not a bad idea to have a technician visit. Be sure he/she measures signal strength at the point the cable connects to your PC and not just looks at the modem. (I'd be surprised that the modem is at fault, unless it is very old.)

[JBH1876]

Last night speed was checked using Speakeasy out of L.A. This afternoon its 4819Kpbs Down & 473 Kbps Up....... I've heard DSL speeds are slowed down for various reasons... Maybe this was just a brief gliche...... ?

[Welshjim]

JBH1876--Sounds like it. Download speeds vary for all the reasons mentioned. (And more )

[CincyJim]

Yes! Cable internet is adversly effected by the number of customers online and buy the actions of their customers; downloading movies, etc. Alot of people downloading movies can make a noticable difference. I read that some cable company pulled the plug on a customer for downloading "too much". She is taking them to court due to the fact her contract did NOT mention any download restriction.