My crude graph |
But, my question is, if there are too many people trying to get on, and everyone is experiencing slowdowns, why does a reboot "fix" it?
Why is it not a gradual degrading of speed, or a sustained slowness for a long period of time. Why is it so abrupt?
Literally, I can be at 6mp all evening. Then within a 30 second window, drop to 0.5mb, I reboot my modem (which takes 45 seconds to come back up) and less than one minute later I'll be cruising at 6mb again, maybe for an hour, maybe 3 hours, maybe 15 minutes...
who knows. Then repeat the process again.
Capacity and usage statistics for network traffic generally follow a nice curve on a graph....mine would instead be a sustained rate with
periodic vertical dips for 1 minute.
See my attached crude drawing....the top is what I would expect on an oversubscribed circuit....as the night goes on, the amount of available bandwidth per customer drops at a somewhat predictable rate, and as peak time passes by, your speed increases as customers drop off the network.
Mine is more like the bottom graph, which does not make sense
at all if there is a bandwidth shortage being suffered by everyone.