Users at work experience different browsing speeds throughout the day. In the morning they notice it to be fast and around noon it becomes rather slow. So they start calling in.

Let us assume the bandwidth is the same, but in the morning employees are still arriving, so fewer people are using the Internet and therefore more speed is available but around noon after people have prayed and ate lunch, they sit down and check their emails and do some youtubing so the Internet is used heavily thus the speed of your Internet responses is slower.

I always wonder how to verify the speed that the ISP promised

So they say you have 512K or 1M, you can never actually reach that high, you can check through your DSL router but truly do you feel that speed, especially when downloading…

well downloading depends on so many things, your PC, your link, other Internet activities on your PC, the server you are downloading from, how many requests is it processing at the time, etc.

There are test sites, but it is not a 100% correct estimate, first maybe your ISP prioritizes the traffic to such sites, so the result isn’t reliable. Second, many people may be using these sites at that moment so servicing your requests takes time and it may give you a lower estimate of your actual speed. When using these sites, you are always requested to closeoff any other application or service that may be using your Internet

Also, how much bandwidth can one ISP handle, to reach outside Kuwait you have to go through their links connecting to KSA, UAE, I am not sure about other countries, and I believe all are using fiber links, no satellite, I guess because it is more expensive. Let us assume that to reach outside Kuwait they have 10GB link only, so the sum of all the Internet offered services shouldn’t exceed that limit but that is not the case.

If you want to think on a smaller scale, each area telephone lines is connected to a telephone exchange centre, the ISP to that centre has a pipe of some speed let us assume (x), as users whose homes are connected to that exchange, subscribe to that ISP Internet services, speed is handed out to them, you may think that the total speed of all consumers should be less or equal to (x) but that isn’t the case, because the ISP assumes that not all of them will utilize the full speed at once, so the total speed promised to all subscribers will actually exceed (x).

You can feel this throughout the day, if you connect in the morning, different from night time, different from weekdays and weekends. If you are always doing the same Internet activity, you shouldn’t notice the difference but because your external speed to the world varies throughout the day, that is how you notice. There are appliances that help prioritize services over others, even IPs, I’m not sure if ISP prioritize some customers over others

Regular users don’t really care much about the actual speed, all they care about is the tolerable manner of Internet performance, so if someone is used to dial-up everything else is WOW to them, and as you go up, the expectations get higher, so if you work in a company, who processes over fiber link for example, dial-up at home won’t do it for you, so you choose DSL at higher speed

As to how to verify the actual speed and is it consistent. Well the ISP has to provide their speed supporting all the way to their ISP, how many users subscribed with them to your telephone exchange, etc

Please keep in mind these are my IT conclusions, so if anything here is incorrect, feel free to correct me