Home
 » ISP News » 
Sponsored Links

Peak Time Congestion Hits Hardest for Broadband ISP Plusnet

Monday, Apr 23rd, 2018 (3:12 pm) - Score 18,461

A new study into the impact on broadband ISP download speeds of peak (afternoon) vs off-peak (morning/daytime) internet usage at the largest six broadband providers in the United Kingdom has revealed that Plusnet suffers the biggest proportional drop in performance, while oddly TalkTalk got faster.

Home broadband is somewhat of a “Best Efforts” service, which may sacrifice guaranteed bandwidth and a low contention ratio in order to be more affordable for residential consumers (i.e. network capacity is shared between many users and thus the performance will vary). Naturally this often becomes more noticeable during periods of heavy usage, such as when more people are online and actively using the connection.

Residential broadband connections typically come under most strain in the late afternoon and evening periods (i.e. after work), while business connections are more likely to be impacted during the daytime period (normal working hours). Exceptions can of course occur, such as during school holidays or when a major event (e.g. sport) causes a surge above normal traffic levels (can occur at almost any time of day).

Advertisement

Broadly speaking the impact tends to be fairly small and it’s arguably going to be less noticeable this year because more ISPs will be upgrading their capacity in order to cope with future / faster technologies, such as G.fast and FTTP/H. Nevertheless we have done a bit of new analysis using Thinkbroadband‘s latest Q1 2018 (March) consumer speedtest data for BT, Plusnet, EE, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and Virgin Media to check.

We should point out that the following are median averages (Megabits per second) that have been extracted from the multi-download (x6) speedtest results. Take note that this may have been impacted by the Easter holidays in late March and it won’t be able to separate business from residential traffic. Off-peak here is defined as Midnight to 5.59am, while Peak reflects 6pm to 11:59pm.

Caution is also advised when looking at upload performance because those are of a lower speed and at this scale it doesn’t take much to produce a big percentage shift one way or the other, even though the actual impact upon end-users will be fairly small.

Average Median Speed Peak vs Off-Peak by ISP (Mbps)

Advertisement

ISP Off-Peak Download Peak Download DL Difference
BT 35.2 33.2 -5.68%
EE 13.1 13.7 4.58%
Plusnet 27.90 25.70 -7.89%
Sky Broadband 19.1 19.1 0.00%
TalkTalk 17 19.4 14.12%
Virgin Media 82 76.7 -6.46%

 

ISP Off-Peak Upload Peak Upload UL Difference
BT 7 6.8 -2.86%
EE 1 2.5 150.00%
Plusnet 5 4.8 -4.00%
Sky Broadband 3.7 4.1 10.81%
TalkTalk 2.7 3.3 22.22%
Virgin Media 8.8 7.3 -17.05%

A quick glance across the variable results shows that there’s no particularly obvious / shared pattern, which perhaps isn’t too surprising given all of the aforementioned factors that could affect the outcome. Admittedly Plusnet did suffer the sharpest decline, although from an end-users perspective it’s negligible.

On the flip side TalkTalk actually gained +2.4Mbps (14.12%) of download speed and it’s unclear how that occurred, although such a jump could in theory be caused by a large migration of users to a faster package or an upgrade in overall network capacity (assuming the network was previously suffering from a shortage of capacity).

The results can also be impacted by the proportion of people choosing to test their connections at different times of date, which may help to explain EE’s rather odd result for upload performance (perhaps more of their FTTC base than ADSL2+ were testing during peak periods etc.).

Advertisement

Last year’s fixed broadband speeds report from Ofcom also helped to demonstrate the kind of impact this can have (here), as visualised below across several different times of day and split between ISP packages. This is arguably one of the most accurate representations available, despite suffering from a relatively small sample size (c.2,000 homes).

ofcom_2017_broadband_speeds_by_technology

UPDATE:

Shifted the Ofcom chart to the bottom to reduce confusion.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and .
Search ISP News
Search ISP Listings
Search ISP Reviews

Comments are closed

Cheap BIG ISPs for 100Mbps+
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
100Mbps
Gift: First 3 Months Free
Youfibre UK ISP Logo
Youfibre £23.99
150Mbps
Gift: None
Vodafone UK ISP Logo
Vodafone £25.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
Plusnet UK ISP Logo
Plusnet £25.99
145Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £25.99
132Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
Cheap Unlimited Mobile SIMs
Smarty UK ISP Logo
Smarty £16.00
Contract: 1 Month
Data: Unlimited
iD Mobile UK ISP Logo
iD Mobile £16.00
Contract: 24 Months
Data: Unlimited
ASDA Mobile UK ISP Logo
ASDA Mobile £19.00
Contract: 24 Months
Data: Unlimited
Three UK ISP Logo
Three £20.00
Contract: 24 Months
Data: Unlimited
Talkmobile UK ISP Logo
Talkmobile £21.95
Contract: 12 Months
Data: 120GB
Cheapest ISPs for 100Mbps+
Gigaclear UK ISP Logo
Gigaclear £19.00
200Mbps
Gift: None
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
100Mbps
Gift: First 3 Months Free
toob UK ISP Logo
toob £22.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
Beebu UK ISP Logo
Beebu £23.00
100 - 160Mbps
Gift: None
Hey! Broadband UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
Promotion
Sponsored

Copyright © 1999 to Present - ISPreview.co.uk - All Rights Reserved - Terms , Privacy and Cookie Policy , Links , Website Rules , Contact
Mastodon