Reasons why the Internet is slower sometimes
you make one Speed Test and you see that what you have contracted arrives and there is no problem. However, suddenly another day you see that the connection is not going well, you have cuts or it takes longer to download a file. You do a speed test again and you see that you get less. But if you do that same test a few hours later it works fine again. What happen?
network saturation
The first cause, although luckily it is not a very common problem, is that there is network saturation. Do you remember the months of confinement in which most of us were at home without going out? Platforms like Netflix decided to slightly lower the quality of the videos to avoid problems as there are many more users connected than usual. Many studies and news even came out where we saw that the Internet was slower.
Well, something like this can happen at any time. Our operator has more users connected than usual or they make greater use of the network and that means that the speed that reaches us is lower. This will depend on the operator, where we live and, also, the date and time we are.
Your neighbors connect more
But one reason that may be more common is that your neighbors connect more. This happens because of how the Wi-Fi network works, basically. There are different channels, both in the 2.4 GHz band and in the 5 GHz band. If you live in a building where there are many houses and many people connecting to the Internet, it is likely that you are using a Wi-Fi channel used by other people too.
What happens if at one time of the day your neighbors connect much more and also use the same channel as you? That would cause the Wi-Fi speed to be worse and you could even have cuts and problems connecting. To avoid this, it is best to choose which Wi-Fi channel to connect to.
More connected devices
Something similar can happen but in your own home. At certain times there may be a increased internet consumption. Think about your relatives or roommates. They are not at home at all times and they are not always connected to Wi-Fi or using it in the same way, of course.
If at certain times your Wi-Fi is worse, it may be because there are more devices connected (more mobile phones, tablets, the television on…) or because more Internet is consumed. Think, for example, of a time when someone in your house is watching videos on Netflix in maximum quality, another person uses the computer to download large files and you want to connect the television via Wi-Fi and you see that it does not work well for you .
Therefore, as you have seen, there are different reasons why Wi-Fi works worse at certain times. It is not something that happens always, or to everyone. But yes, it is possible that any of these causes affects you and that is why you see that the connection is not going as well as you would like at all times.