Download speed oddity
 

I have noticed recently that the download speed I get around 8-10pm is usually over twice the speed obtained from around midday-6pm.

Would have thought the opposite would be the case as mid-evening is reckoned to be the busiest time?

I download things for my flight sim, the best time for me is early morning and I've been told it's because the Yanks are still in bed!!

You'll find that all those folk sitting at work between 12-6pm are using a massive amount of bandwidth compared to those folk all sitting at home 8-10pm chatting online, or even downloading stuff.

Thus, the "daytime" Internet in the UK is far far slower in comparison to the evening.

You'll probably also find that your service provider gives a higher priority to their "business" traffic during the day, as opposed to consumers, who are meant to be out at work at that time :E

frostbite,

The issue of speed on the internet is a strange and complex business.

PPrune is not the place to explain it, it would take far too long to even start describing it to a non-technically inclined audience. :8

The one thing you need to remember about ADSL is that speeds are not guaranteed. There is contention everywhere along the way. As a home user, you are subject to much higher contention ratios than business users.

There is a BT technical document that describes the speeds that your line can slow down to before they consider it to be a problem, and you might find that speed is surprisingly low for what the marketing guys call a "8Mb" line.

There are certain points on the internet where lots of ISPs group together to interconnect and exchange traffic free of charge. Here is a graph of the biggest such place in the UK, which might explain why you are seeing things speed up as the evening wears on.

https://stats.linx.net/cgi-pub/aggregate-day

Download speeds
 

Here is an interesting site where you can not only check your speed and keep a log of the results, one can also compare results by country, region,or town.

Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test

CYPR

Posted and worked just fine here in the Colonies.

RJ

Just don't rely too much on speed tests for accuracy. They will only give you a rough indication of your actual speed.