Right now I'm going through what I would imagine to be nightmare of every web worker. That's right: my internet connection is extremely slow. Just to clarify, it's been fine during the day but it's been insane slow at night (peak hours). My last speedtest (through speedtest.nyc.rr.com) put me at 509 kbps down and 403 kbps up. That's just a pitiful 63.6KB/sec down on a 10Mbit line! In other words... not good. So this all started about 10-14 days ago when I noticed that transfers after 7pm or so were abnormally slow. This is a problem for me because I regularly work late at night plus I do must of my television consumption through my computer so I'm am always downloading something. I have not been doing any Bittorrenting lately and I don't run a server from home, but I am a heavy internet user and I watch a lot of Hulu. After about 7pm video download would crawl along and downloading games through Steam would be extremely painful. Just as an example, my iPhone 2.1 update took me close to two hours to download. After about a week I called Time Warner, my internet service provider. I have high-speed access (a cable modem) through Time Warner's Road Runner service. It costs me $40.82 a month (just for internet) and it's the only option in my building. So after about an hour on the phone (unplug the modem, circumvent the router, unplug the modem again, run speedtest, etc) a problem could not be found. I was told that a new modem would probably do the trick so people would come at as soon as possible to make the switch. That was Thursday or Friday (September 11th or 12) and someone came yesterday (the 16th) between noon and 2pm. It seemed like an easy fix and obvious solution. Just at noon (I was impressed) on the 16th the a two man team came to make the fix. They were quick and professional, which I appreciated, and while here they confirmed that there was a problem (during the day I am getting about 6000-7000Kb down) and swapped the modem. They also did a quick check on the line, inside and outside (or at least they said they checked outside). They soon left and my internet was fine for they day. Of course, the problem came back at night, and now I can't even watch a streaming video on Hulu and the front page of Ebay take about 25 seconds to load. I was going to download Crysis from Steam (about 7GB) but that would probably take a few weeks at these speeds, so I'll wait for tomorrow. I spent another hour on the phone with Time Warner tonight and I was eventually escalated to Level Three (sounds impressive right?). We did a trace route, which people under Level Three don't do and the upper level support people clearly know a lot more about what's going on than the "unplug your router and turn your computer off" people that you have to spend the first 45 minutes with. This did not yield any solution, but I do have someone coming at the closest time (Monday the 22nd!) to do another line check. Apparently it's mandatory to have two visits within through days before they escalate your ticket to the infracture team or the networking geeks. I'll try to keep this post up-to-date as things develop. As it goes now things are insanely frustrating and I don't get the feeling that things are going to be fixed any time soon. Update: 9/25/08, 8:43am- The problems are still persisting. Since my original post I have gotten another new modem, with a few parts of the coax line changed. Additionally I updated the firmware on my router, just in case that was an issue. My test last night had my connection at about 600 Kbps down and 480 Kbps up. Speedtest.net just put me at 14601 down and 490 up, so there is a marked difference between peak hours and off hours. It's looking like I'll have to call Time Warner again...