Why does the internet slow down in the evening? HIZTESTI data

In HIZTESTI's measurements typical download speed is 48.3 Mbps at the best hour of the night and 39.4 Mbps around 20:00. One caveat: different people test at different hours, and some evening testers are testing because something already feels slow. So we don't pin the whole drop on the network, but the direction is clear.

Speed drops, ping doesn't

The most telling detail here is what stays the same. While evening download speed falls, ping (how long your connection takes to answer a signal) is almost identical around the clock. Jitter, how much ping wobbles, rises a little in the evening.

48.3 Mbps

Typical download at the best hour of the night

39.4 Mbps

Typical download at the worst evening hour

21 ms

Typical ping, all day

4 ms

Highest typical evening jitter

The pattern says the road doesn't get longer, it gets busier. Ping is the round trip to a server and is set by distance. Distance doesn't change at 9 pm, so ping doesn't either. The number of people on the same road does.

What actually happens in the evening?

The line into your home joins other lines from your street, building and city at some point. Your provider sizes that shared part on the assumption that not everyone will run at full speed at once. During the day the assumption holds. In the evening, streaming, football, gaming and video calls all pile into the same hours, the shared part fills up, and everyone's slice gets smaller.

Something similar happens inside your home. Everyone is back; the TV streams, phones back up photos, someone downloads a game. Your line is split between those devices and a speed test only measures one slice of it.

How the devices in your home split your speed: Devices sharing your connection

In an apartment block there's a third crowd: Wi-Fi channels. Your neighbours' routers are busier in the evening too, and networks on the same channel take turns to transmit.

To tell a Wi-Fi slowdown apart from the rest: Why Wi-Fi slows your speed test

Are weekend evenings worse?

Slightly. On weekday evenings (8 pm to midnight) typical download is 41.2 Mbps; on weekend evenings it's 39.3 Mbps. Mornings flip the picture: weekend mornings, at 45.5 Mbps, are clearly faster than the evenings. The hours when people are home are the hours the line is busiest.

Is it your setup or your provider?

You prove an evening slowdown with a comparison, not a single test: measure morning and evening under the same conditions and look at the gap.

1. Connect your computer to the router with a cable. It's the quickest way to take Wi-Fi out of the equation.
2. Make sure nothing else in the home is streaming, downloading or backing up during the test.
3. Run one test in the morning (between 7 and 9 am) and one in the evening (between 8 and 10 pm) on the same day.
4. Repeat on at least three different days; one bad evening isn't enough to blame your provider.
5. Keep the result links. Every result has its own address you can send to your provider.

If a wired, idle line tests well in the morning and consistently poorly in the evening, the bottleneck is outside your home, in the provider's shared network. If mornings are poor too, the problem is most likely inside: router, Wi-Fi or device.

Run a test first to see where your result sits. Start a speed test

What you can do

• Move important things to a cable. A cabled video meeting or game suffers far less from the evening crowd than Wi-Fi.
• Schedule big downloads for the night. Game updates and cloud backups can be scheduled on most devices.
• Use your router's 5 GHz band. It's less affected by neighbouring networks.
• Complain with records. A few days of morning and evening results beat "it's slow in the evenings" every time.

A faster plan doesn't always fix evening slowdowns. If the bottleneck is in the provider's shared network, a bigger plan still goes down the same crowded road.

To find the source of a slowdown in three steps: Why is my internet slow