I’m losing my mind here. During the day, I can pull 400Mbps easy while working from home, but as soon as it hits 8:00 PM, my connection is tanking. I’m talking buffering on 1080p YouTube videos and lag spikes in gaming that make everything unplayable.
I’ve rebooted my gateway a dozen times, but nothing changes. My ISP’s automated bot just says “everything looks good on our end”.
Man, you’re basically describing the classic “digital rush hour”. Your problem is the evening radio clog. Turn on NetSpot to check for interference (channel overlap) from neighboring routers, which become especially noisy during prime time.
It’s almost certainly ISP Throttling or “Traffic Shaping”. A lot of providers have these sneaky algorithms that detect high-bandwidth activities like torrenting or heavy streaming during peak hours. They’ll artificially cap your speeds to keep their overall network from crashing under the weight of a thousand people binge-watching the latest HBO show. The reason your ISP says “everything is fine” is because they usually whitelist speed test sites. When you run a test, the ISP recognizes the server and gives you the “green light” full speed just to make their stats look good. But the moment you try to actually use that data for something else, they clip your wings. You could try using a VPN to mask your traffic; sometimes if they can’t see what you’re doing, they won’t throttle you as aggressively.
Check your hardware environment, especially your Wi-Fi network load. I highly recommend downloading a Wi-Fi scanning app (NetSpot is a good one). Check for network congestion.
Don’t overlook DNS issues. People think DNS is just a “set it and forget it” thing, but ISP-provided DNS servers are notoriously garbage and get bogged down when everyone is online. When you click a link, your computer has to ask the ISP “Where is this website?” If their server is struggling to keep up with the evening surge, it’ll feel like your internet is dragging, even if the actual download speed is technically there. Try switching your DNS to Cloudflare ($1.1.1.1$) or Google ($8.8.8.8$). It won’t make your raw bandwidth “faster”, but it makes the web feel way more responsive because the “handshake” happens instantly. It’s a 5-minute fix that solves more “slow internet” complaints than almost anything else.
Wow, thanks for all the insight, everyone. I honestly didn’t realize how much the “neighborhood” factor played into this. I ran NetSpot like a couple of you suggested and — holy cow — the 5GHz band in my living room is a war zone after 7:00 PM. I counted 14 different networks overlapping with mine!