How is ADLS bandwidth shared between providers?

CiniO

I live in small town in rural area, so I have no benefits of fibre or next generation broadband which was around for a good while now.
All we have available here is standard ADLS, which can connect at 7Mbit/s but max speed achievable at my house is 6Mbit/s.
It's not that bad really, but let's get to the point.

I was with Eircom for good few years, and I was happy with them expect from the price. For such connection they charge 60 quid a month. Broadband always worked good, and there was no congestion really. Even at peak times, I still had 6Mbit/s available to me.
However due to price, I decided to switch to Vodafone. They told me they use the same line, so speed will be exactly same as with Eircom. Only difference was meant to be the price which was 35 per month compare to 60 per month.

Unfortunately broadband doesn't seem to work as good as it was after switching. At off-peak times it works good, and there's still 6Mbit/s available.
But at peak times, it falls down to 1Mbit/s or less sometimes, and ping sometimes goes above 200ms which is really bad IMO.

Does that meant, that vodafone gets only certain amount of bandwidth within the line to our town, and as they have more customers than Eircom due to pricing, their share of bandwidth is more congested than Eircom's?

Or is there any other explanation?

braddun

ADSL broadband uses a shared connection and, just as less seats become available on a bus or train as more and more people use the service, less bandwidth is available in the evenings and at weekends as more people are home and trying to connect to the Internet themselves. The correct phrase for this is 'contention ratio' which refers to the ratio between the maximum capacity of the telephone exchange and the number of users currently accessing the service.

Peak broadband usage times are usually between 7pm and 10pm at night, and this is when you may notice that your service is noticeably slower. The best time to use the Internet is between 12am and 8am, when the service usually a lot quieter.

CiniO

braddun wrote: »

ADSL broadband uses a shared connection and, just as less seats become available on a bus or train as more and more people use the service, less bandwidth is available in the evenings and at weekends as more people are home and trying to connect to the Internet themselves. The correct phrase for this is 'contention ratio' which refers to the ratio between the maximum capacity of the telephone exchange and the number of users currently accessing the service.

Peak broadband usage times are usually between 7pm and 10pm at night, and this is when you may notice that your service is noticeably slower. The best time to use the Internet is between 12am and 8am, when the service usually a lot quieter.

Thanks for reply.
I generally know all that.
What gets me wondering though, why this effect of less bandwidth being available at peak times is so noticeable on Vodafone ADSL connection, and it was not noticeable at all on Eircom connection, if supposaby they use the same telephone exchange and line.

ED E

It should be the same. Voice traffic is prioritized over all others, but all broadband is on a level playing field.

The only thing that could be different would be the BRAS location, if eircoms is local and vodafone host theirs more centrallythat could change things. But I doubt that much really. Get somebody else local on eircom to test at the same time as you do, see what happens.