The Great New Zealand Internet Slow-Down

I have been having problems recently with my international Internet connection slowing down during peak times in the evening.

Do you remember the bad old days when you got home from school/work and the modem couldn’t dial up your ISP because the line was overloaded?

Well it appears we have similar congestion back for a lot of people on heavily contested networks.

I personally have a few factors playing against me.

1) I live right at the edge of the Mount Eden exchange – my line attenuation is 32.6 dB (downstream) / 16 dB (upstream)

2) I’m not in Telecom’s plans to upgrade in the next two years - https://telecomwholesale.co.nz/maps

All that said I get a pretty good connection

Downstream rate: 6183 kbps
Upstream rate: 995 kbps

This leads me to the troubling trend that I have been noticing:

My international connection is slowing down to a crawl every evening between 6-8pm!

In a “grass is greener moment” I moved my Internet from Snap to Orcon a process that completed yesterday.

Unfortunately it didn’t improve my slow evening broadband problem.

So during the worst time last night I thought I’d conduct a twitter survey to see what sort of speeds others were getting.

Unfortunately as you see from the results below there appears to be no rhyme or reason as to the results.

Orcon

My connection to Washington @ 8pm last night

@themorgan around the same time with the same ISP

@nzben around the same time with the same ISP

@nakedgeek about an hour later on the same ISP

Snap

@nzadhall around the same time with SNAP

Telecom

@venzann on Telecom about an hour later

@dean_m from Telecom an hour and a half later

Telstra Clear

@chakkaradeep from Telstra Clear in Wellington about an hour later

@nathanm from Telstra Clear

Vodafone

@DylanReeve two and a half hours later

On the face of it the data above points to a congestion problem that seems to affect some isp’s/ exchanges more than others during peak times. What it doesn’t explain is why @themorgan’s Internet was rocking while others on the same ISP couldn’t get any sort of decent throughput at all.

Incidentally I did run another speed test on orcon from home at 6:30am this morning and my connection is back to normal.

I see more rants about this stuff over on the geekzone forums.

My question now is am I going to be better of with another ISP? Is it worth moving again after only one day with Orcon? If so who should I go with?