Slow BB

[Rascal]

I live in South London SE20 and work from home. I have a 600k connection via my set top box.

During the day, things are fine, sites appear quickly as expected. BUT, around 6pm, sites take ages to appear or they just stick. My 56k dial up is quicker!!!!

Surely, it can't be because more people are accessing the Internet when they get home from school/work around where I live.

Does anyone else have the same problem?

When I first got 600k BB (it was actually 512k back then) there was never a problem. It was full speed ahead, 24 hours a day. In the last few months, however, peak time usage is slowing down more and more. I seem to be gettig download speeds about 50% of what I should be getting. I assume this is because more people are now using BB in my area.

BB is what the techie types on here call a 'contended' service - i.e. ntl same the same chunk of bandwidth to lots of people on the basis that they're unlikely all to be on the net at the same time. However there has been much discussion on this and other sites about exactly how many people ntl have been selling the same chunk of service to. Even allowing for the internet generally slowing down when all the kiddies get on it after school, you shouldn't end up with a connection so slow you start yearning after your old dial-up account...

Try contacting the helpdesk. There could be some problem somewhere, although I'm not in the know enough to suggest what kinds of problem could cause it to slow down so much!