Last week I noticed that my internet connection was slower than usual (My Comcast Internet Connection is Getting Slower at TypePad). Then a few days later it was a lot faster then usual. What's going on here?

In an attempt to find out what was happening, I spent yesterday checking the speed of my internet connection (Comcast/Xfinity in Philadelphia). Each hour I logged the download speed, upload speed and ping time. The upload speed was generally consistent (around 3Mb/s) so I'll just present the download data here:

Hour
Download Speed (Mb/s)

7:00am
5.19

8:00am
5.53

9:00am
5.55

10:00am
7.87

11:00am
8.08

Noon
5.49

1:00pm
8.07

2:00pm
4.68

3:00pm
3.81

4:00pm
6.28

5:00pm
8.42

6:00pm
8.10

7:00pm
4.42

8:00pm
5.50

9:00pm
5.23

10:00pm
4.10

11:00pm
7.51

Midnight
8.43

Average
6.24

Analysis

The slowest speed was 3.81 Mb/s while the fastest was over twice that at 8.43 Mb/s. However what really got my attention was the timing of the fast and slow times. In periods of the day when you would expect people to be busy working the download times are fast. Both 10:00am and 11:00am are right around 8 Mb/s. Some of the slowest times are in the evening (prime World of Warcraft time?) with no speed over 5.50 Mb/s.

Notes

I used SpeedTest.net to test my internet connection. The test happens right in the web browser, there's nothing to download and install. To see the full set of data that I collected and see a graph of it check out this Google Spreadsheet.