[SOLVED] speed test high but download really slow every night

Oct 9, 2019
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Hi,

I recently moved to my girlfriend house and she has her own internet service (60 mbits/s) so I dropped mine. When I was going to her house before, we were getting some buffering when streaming stuff that worked fine at my place but didn't really make a big deal out of it since I wasn't there often. I just thought it was the wifi.

Now that I moved there, I realized that at night between 8 and 10 all downloads become reallllly slow suddenly (100-300 kB/s). Its the same from my phone over wifi, its the same on my computer on wifi and its the same from my computer with a wired connection. At first I thought it was the site I stream from even if its usually extremely fast but it isn't because I also tested a bunch of test files to download on different sites that are super fast outside of that time period (20-50 mbits/s) and I'm getting the same results for all (100-300 kB/s) and on top of that I also tried the same links that are super slowed down on my phone using my data plan and I'm getting even more than 50 mbits/s on all tests. So the sources are not the problem.

At that point I'm thinking that this is just a crap ISP and they are throttling my connection because all of those links are working fine on my data plan but what I don’t understand is that during that time period when all downloads become super slow, if I do a test speed on speedtest.net or on fast.com for instance I'm getting very good results (between 30 and 60 mbits/s). I also tried a very popular torrent and it was downloading fast. How can all my direct downloads be super slow but my speedtest be totally fine? is there something that I’m not getting? Can my ISP restrain my connection selectively like that?

Thanks!
 
Solution
check you router config if those are correct it the isp i have 25 mbps connection and the max download speed i get is 3 mbps but when i test my speed it shows 25 mbps because the speed tests are done by connecting to ISP's local server (their own server) so the speeds are high but while downloading from external servers the speed is slow.

Md Noman 1

Reputable
Feb 3, 2017
83
5
4,565
check you router config if those are correct it the isp i have 25 mbps connection and the max download speed i get is 3 mbps but when i test my speed it shows 25 mbps because the speed tests are done by connecting to ISP's local server (their own server) so the speeds are high but while downloading from external servers the speed is slow.
 
Solution

hftvhftv

Distinguished
Ambassador
If you live in America sorry to tell you that you don't have net neutrality, your service provider can throttle whatever they want. I'd suggest using a VPN service, even the free ones can perform better than nothing at all.
 
Oct 9, 2019
5
0
10
check you router config if those are correct it the isp i have 25 mbps connection and the max download speed i get is 3 mbps but when i test my speed it shows 25 mbps because the speed tests are done by connecting to ISP's local server (their own server) so the speeds are high but while downloading from external servers the speed is slow.

Ah ok I didn't know that the speedtest sites were working like that. That would explain the difference between that and an actual download. Any reason why a torrent would still go fast? is it because its coming from a bunch of difference sources?
 
Oct 9, 2019
5
0
10
If you live in America sorry to tell you that you don't have net neutrality, your service provider can throttle whatever they want. I'd suggest using a VPN service, even the free ones can perform better than nothing at all.

yes i tried that yesterday with a free windscribe account but i was still getting crap speed.
 

Md Noman 1

Reputable
Feb 3, 2017
83
5
4,565
Ah ok I didn't know that the speedtest sites were working like that. That would explain the difference between that and an actual download. Any reason why a torrent would still go fast? is it because its coming from a bunch of difference sources?
I don't know about torrent(i don't use it) it may be requesting a bunch of connections from the server like internet download manager dose.
 
Oct 9, 2019
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Same exact thing last night. its slow until 10 pm exactly to the second. At 10 sharp my speed improves dramatically. is that proof that the isp is limiting speed on a fix schedule? I would like to switch isp but it will cost me more and I’m worried that will do the exact same thing because it wasn’t the isp afterall