Sunday Evening, the New Web Rush Hour

Barence writes "For anyone who assumes weekday evenings are the worst time to enter the online scrum, it may be a surprise to learn that the peak internet rush hour, when average web speeds slow to a crawl, is in fact Sunday between 5pm and 6pm. This surprise fact came out of Ofcom's recent research that also told us the blindingly obvious news that actual broadband speeds are less than half of those advertised by the ISPs."

Comments

Kids

[Thelasko]

It's probably kids doing their homework before school the next day.

From TFA:

On weekdays, there is a sharp decline in speeds between 3pm and 4pm (school finishing time) followed by a levelling-off between 6pm and 7pm, which can perhaps be attributed to people leaving their computers for dinner (a similar resurgence in speed is seen on Sunday evening at the same time).

eBay users already knew this

[SuperKendall]

I would have said Sunday evening was the heaviest time of use, just based on my experience selling items on eBay - it was always best to end an auction sometime Sunday night.

Re:eBay users already knew this

[Haoie]

Well that's a little different. Plenty of workplaces block access to auction websites during the working week.

And people are likely to be out during Sat evening. On Sun however, work tomorrow morning, you know? Easily explainable.

Physical world still king

[heroine]

Even with all the digitization & virtualization, the physical world is king. People get home from whatever they were doing at 5pm on Sunday. People have to physically be commuting in another few hours. Packages are not physically shipped on weekends, so people wait until the last time they can place an order before the next shipment.

Re:Home alone.

[ShieldW0lf]

The Asian economy is the powerhouse of the globe. Anyone who is involved in finance is going to be paying attention to it.

What time is it in Asia when it's Sunday evening in the UK? Monday morning.

For those who didn't read the second article

[hellfire]

That second article is for the British Telecoms not telecoms in general. While I might be tempted to believe this for American or Canadian Telecoms, the article makes no such claims. So, as usual, the summary is inflammatory and deceptive.

It's nice to know reporters on the other side of the pond make the same arrogant mistakes Americans do when they assume everyone has the same experiences as they do.