who knows about the Internet ???

why does the Internet slow down to a standstill sometimes.

we have a good Internet speed from virgin media and most of the time its really fast but occasionally its totally unusable

the last two days have been impossible with constant "Internet explorer can not display this web page" and the odd page that will take about three minuets to load

what causes this ??? weather ? high usage ?? i was even blaming the workers on the railway line last night.

this morning.... its back to normal

The information super highway is just that... a highway.

Drive on the M25 at 4am on a sunday and it's a pleasure,,
Drive on it at 5pm on a Friday and it's not..

it's all to do with Bandwidth or how wide the road is if you see my point.

The pipe your internet travels down is only so big and the switch which this pipe runs from nearest to your house will be set up to cope with a maximum number of users at any given time.. the more people sign up to your provider in your area the slower it will be until Virgin upgrade the switch. This is made even more complicated by the fact that Virgin don't own the switch, BT do.


At peak times the internet will slow and at really busy times it can even stop.

There are many other reasons but i wont confuse you anymore than i probably have already.

the internet in the uk is very slow compared to other countries which have better infrastructures.

We are still relying on old switches and BT lines..

Hope that helped.

Nick

Hi

You are competing with 49 other users for your so called 8Mbps bandwidth. If you are more than .5 miles from the exchange you will be lucky to get anything more than 4Mbps sustained rate. Once you get past the other 49 users at the user node, you then go onto the concentrator at the exchange which probably have 1000 users trying to get at 200Mbps. Once you get past the local exchange you then hit the national gateways on to the Pan-euro backbone which runs about 100Gbps with millions of users. To top it all you most certainly hit the transatlantic cable at some point and this will slow you down again.

To top it all website servers may be supporting 10,000 concurrent user connections and most have bandwidth limits imposed to reduce their costs.

So once you add all the bottle necks together you are very lucky to get anything at all.

Something to try.

Open a command prompt and enter the following.
tracert bbc.co.uk

each line of the resulting output is either a router or a server. From my desk PC I get 18 devices between me and the BBC website. Each device has a limited bandwidth and multitude of users attached.

so sticking my head out the window and screaming "get off your computers, im trying to check the weather" may actually help ???

Yup that's about right