My Downloading Conspiracy Theory
 

Does anyone else out there have Charter Cable for Internet service? I have a conspiracy theory that when I go to download sponsor content, all the sudden my signal goes from 54 MBPS to 11 then 20 and bouncing around between 1 MBPS and 48 MBPS until the downloads are done. Am I trippin' here? I know recently there was a thread about 5% of the users download 90% of the bandwidth or something, but is this happening to anyone else or have I been starting at this computer too long? I swear it only happens when I start downloading more than like 5 one minute clips at a time....

I have Charter Cable for high speed internet and cable and yes, it does seem at times that Charter is conducting a personal campaign against you. Their speed varies considerably but I have had very fast speeds downloading content. How close your physical address is to one on their servers does affect speed. You have noticed that they advertise "up to" 5Mbps or 10Mbps. DSL is even a worse problem with the uneven quality of phone lines around the country. Charter has been undergoing huge maintenance work for the past 6 months here in the Midwest, trying to upgrade some towns service. That has really affected speeds and quality of cable signal. Had Cox when I lived in California and their speed was very good but when I moved to the mountains of California, it was dial-up and Directv which was fine until they were bribed by XM and dumped Music Choice. Our phone lines in the mountains could not even handle DSL.

Some broadband carriers use bandwidth management schemes that slow down large down/up-loads in order to allow for "burst" traffic. This keeps the average surfers pages loading quickly but sucks for large file transfers. It's all an issue of how the ISP manages it's bandwidth use.