Spanish customers suffer this slowdown, daily, between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. at night approximately as rush hour (although the decline can start from 7:00 p.m.). The reasons are varied, but there are certain common patterns to explain this effect that could be summarized in a main key: the network saturation.
Internet at rush hour
As usually happens in other types of traffic jams, in public transport or highways, there are certain hours when a large volume of users wants to transit through a space simultaneously and the service collapses or their transit speed is reduced. The same happens in the case of Internet connections.
In terms of browsing, it is during the night, usually after dinner, that we connect to Netflix, surf the Internet, watch YouTube, listen to music online, etc. This barrage of traffic is what causes the slowdown by having to accommodate a large number of people at the same time that raise the average of the rest of the hours of the day as it is generally a time frame in which everyone is already out of their working hours.
Bearing in mind that all these activities also increase the weight of the content they access, we see that absolutely all the large Spanish operators reflect a drop in connection speed, which has a direct impact on their customers’ browsing.
If we take as reference the last Barometer of fixed Internet connections in Spain 2021 Prepared by nPerf, one of the main leaders in Internet testing of telecommunications networks in the world, we observed a slight decline as of 7:00 p.m. for all the operators analyzed: with differences in speed between the operators Digi, MásMóvil/Yoigo, Movistar, Vodafone and Orange.
Possible solutions or improvements
If you can’t fix your slow internet problems overnight, it may be time to re-evaluate your internet plan, connection type, or provider. As we observed in that nPerf report, not all companies show the same drops within the same hour, although there is a drop in that section.
If your habits require the best possible connection within that slow hour window, you might consider switching providers. In the event that you are happy with your current company and it just falls apart in that rush hour, you can consider a change of habits to carry out certain activities at other less crowded hours.
Other exclusive alternatives for wireless traffic could be the change of band. If you’re using a dual-band router, which uses 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi, you’ll be able to choose which Wi-Fi band to use at all times, simply by going into your device’s configuration settings.
The main difference between these bands is speed capability. 2.4GHz Wi-Fi will support up to 600Mbps, while 5GHz will support up to 1300Mbps. Many devices that require lower speeds crowd the 2.4 GHz band, resulting in slower speeds and dropped connections in general. Switching to the less crowded 5 GHz band can improve the quality of Internet activities, such as streaming and online gaming, that previously worked poorly.