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Cable Modem Primetime Slowdown - Myth or Reality?
The Llama King asks: "SBC (SWBell, Pacbell, etc.) is whacking away at Time Warner cable in our area, running DSL ads that make fun of prime-time cable modem slowdown. And Time Warner-Houston/RoadRunner does seem to be having a problem in the past month with nasty ping times between 8 pm - midnight Central time (traces submitted to internal RoadRunner news groups show the problem appears to be a pair of routers at the gateway to one of several backbones). While this problem is recent, it begs the question - are prime-time cable slowdowns real or a myth? Can a well-configured cable modem network avoid the congestion SBC pokes fun at in their commercials, or is it inevitable? What are Slashdot users seeing?"
FWIW, I have not noticed slow "times" of the day in my area. However, Planetcable was forced to stop accepting subscribers until Comcast had upgraded their infrastructure to support the additional traffic, so this could be an atypical situation.
In general though, I have noticed a substantial variation in the quality of service from day to day, and month to month. Some days or weeks at a time it's fine, and other times it's horrible (high ping/high packet loss) for months.
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