Most people who use the internet know that certain sites are slow, and others are fast. Only some really know why. The reason is, yes you guessed it, too many people overloading the web page, but it goes deeper than that. Your Internet Service Provider is behind the scenes controlling the speed of the internet, they are the reason why this blog loaded so slow. It is not because so many people are reading the interesting articles at Computer Geeks, it is because the ISP only lets the user a certain amount of bandwidth or access to the?web.
The name for it is data transfer cap, they are?almost the norm now, which means that high speed cable Internet isn’t as high speed as it used to be.
When cable Internet was new, it was not uncommon to realize download speeds of over 2 or 3mbs. In fact, I remember one user who was downloading at over 10mbs! Of course, in those early exciting days, the cable subscribers were few and shared bandwidth wasn’t a problem.
So many people access the internet every day, it is no wonder all these pages are slow since you and the rest of the world are?zooming around downloading, uploading, and sucking up all the speed that is limited.
Many ISPs engineered their facilities in the 1990s to use dynamic capacity allocation to serve multiple bursty users. Each user is expected to use high speed transmission for only a short time, for example to download a megabyte web page in less than a second. When use is continuous, as for?file sharing or?Internet radio or?streaming video, a few users who use the connection at high rates for hours at a time may seriously impair the service of others.
One type of bandwidth cap, administered by an?Internet service provider?simply limits the?bitrate or speed of data transfer on a broadband Internet connection. The purpose of bandwidth capping is to prevent individual users from consuming the entire transmission capacity of the cable, a shared resource. Critics have charged that it is a method to charge consumers more by introducing tiered bandwidth caps.
Cable is a shared service which works like a LAN?a local area network. Your cable performance varies depending on how many people, in your neighborhood, are using the cable service at the same time.
If your whole neighborhood is using the cable service, then your Internet speed drops. However, if you are the only one using the cable service, your Internet speed could increase dramatically.
So your bandwidth could vary widely throughout the day. At least, with this shared bandwidth model, you have the chance to realize higher Internet speeds. Typically, early in the morning or late in the evening, you would notice better performance. However, this is changing. And the reason is due to?capping.
As the broadband market increased, many cable providers began imposing data transfer caps. This goes back a few years, but many subscribers weren’t even aware of it?not aware why their download speeds seemed slower than originally advertised. Data transfer caps prevent you from exceeding a certain speed limit. Depending on your provider, the download caps could be under 256kbs or over 1.5mps.
What this means is that the shared bandwidth system no longer gives you any potential, at all, to achieve faster speeds. Even if you are the only person on the Internet, your bandwidth will never increase.
Again, consider yourself lucky if you have or can find a cable service provider that does not impose capping and that guarantees a minimum data transfer rate, not just a maximum one.
By the way, at the present time, my maximum cable download speed is 64kbs, but averages more often at 10kbs. I’ve been capped for the month by going over the transfer limit quota.