Your internet is fine all day, then crawls right when you sit down to watch something at 9pm. It’s one of the most common broadband complaints, and the cause is usually one of two things.
1. You’re sharing the line with the whole building
Many connections split one line across many homes — what providers call the contention ratio. During the day it’s fine because few people are online. Come evening, everyone in your building streams, scrolls and games at once, and the shared pipe gets crowded. Your speed drops even though “nothing changed” at your end.
The fix is a dedicated line. Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) runs a connection straight into your flat, so you’re not fighting your neighbours for bandwidth at peak hours. This is the single biggest reason evening speeds hold up — or don’t.
2. Your router is the bottleneck
Even on a good line, a tired router caps everything. A few things to check:
- Use the 5GHz band for devices near the router — it’s faster and less crowded than 2.4GHz. Keep 2.4GHz for far-away or older devices.
- Move the router into the open, not inside a TV cabinet or behind the fridge. Walls and metal kill signal.
- Reboot it once in a while. Cheap routers leak performance after weeks of uptime.
- Count your devices. Twenty phones, TVs, cameras and smart plugs add up. A weak router struggles to juggle them.
3. The “fair usage” trap
If the slowdown starts late in the month and never recovers until your next cycle, it might not be congestion at all — it could be a fair-usage policy (FUP) throttling your speed after a data limit. Genuinely unlimited plans don’t do this.
The short version
If evenings are slow every day, suspect a shared line — ask your provider whether it’s fiber all the way to your home. If it’s only sometimes, look at your router placement and bands. And if it’s always late in the billing cycle, check for an FUP.
Smartlink runs FTTH straight to your flat with no FUP, so the 9pm rush doesn’t slow you down. See plans or check your building.
