On Jan 16, 2006, at 1:10 PM, Michael Robertson wrote: > Thankyou for your reply. The setup info for my situation is: > Insight cable modem to Airport Extreme base station. It is located > as close to the middle of my house to be as equally spaced between > my two macs, one is a cube, which uses the older airport card, > running OS 10.3.9, and the other is a gooseneck iMac, that has the > newer airport card, that is running 10.4.4. I have the latest > software and firmware for the ABS. My main question is, why is the > speed of my connection so inconsistent? At night when you would > expect the traffic load to be high, it is almost like going back to > dialup performance ( anywere from 250 to 500 Kb ) In the morning it > is much better, ( from 1.5Mb to 2.5Mb ). I am using 3 different > sites to get these numbers, Cnet, Bandwidthplace, and Toast.Net.
Cable and DSL generally behave the opposite in the sense that DSL is slow during the day and speeds up at night, while cable is faster during the day. This is because DSL is marketed to businesses and cable is marketed to homes. So, I would expect some cable slowdown in the evening, but your numbers are far worse than what I've seen. The way both cable and DSL are set up is to have a high speed line, such as a 45 Mb/s T3 put in at a central location for a region--such as the telephone switching station--and then put routers on it to direct the local subscriber traffic. The speed to the Internet is going to depend on the subscriber load put onto the big fast line. If the company oversubscribes the T3, then the downstream clients are going to suffer. A company that's on top of things will monitor network load and install more bandwidth where it's needed. Your area might be oversubscribed. I'd call Insight and complain; it can't hurt. I tested this stuff last year with a little Perl program that timed how long it took to move a 10 MB file around with ftp. I set it up to run once per hour for a day or two and keep track of the timings. Maybe it's time to dig it up the program and try it again at a few sites. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2398 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20060116/2bb422b8/attachment.bin
