Sympatico slow

[John Macdonald]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 09:47:06AM -0400, Phillip Qin wrote:
> The speed goes down beteween 9 - 12pm every day. I am on Ultra but I got 5K
> during this time slot. I called sympatico. Having unable to boost my speed,
> tech support decided to replace my SS5200 E240 with a new one, SS5200 E242.
> That didn't solve the problem. I thought only cable Internet access has this
> issue.

Any Internet connection can have this problem - there are
multiple connections between your computer and "the Internet".
Cable can have bottlenecks in your local neighbourhood - the
local cable drop is an Ethernet network that can be filled
up if people near to you are using the connection at the same
time; while DSL uses a dedicated line from your home so that
specific segment cannot get loaded down by any activity other
than your own.  However, once your connection has proceeded
from your local neighbourhood to the ISP's site, there are
still lots of possibilities for bottlenecks either within the
ISP site (e.g. there are too many customers on the same routing
segment or going through a particular piece of hardware) or
at the boundary to the outside world (if the total bandwidth
of the ISP's connection to the outside world is less than the
combined bandwidth of all their customers access requests,
things slow down).  Making sure that the bandwidth capacity
is large enough for most usage and not too bad for the worst
peaks of usage is necessary for good customer relations; but
it is a dynamic problem since those customers can change their
usage patterns both in the short term or over the long term.

-- 
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml