How or what could have caused the speed and what are they doing on their end to fix it?
In: Technology
It largely depends on the type of connection you have: cable, telephone (copper), or fiber. Each of these technologies has their own quirks and issues when it comes to speed. But there are a few things each of them has in common.
Firstly, they’re all managed by back-end software that optimizes your personal connection to their network. Small adjustments are being made all the time to ensure you get the best speed for the physical conditions leading up to your house.
For the most part, these connections transfer data by a method known as FDM, or Frequency Division Multiplexing. It isn’t a single channel coming in, it’s hundreds or thousands of them, each carrying a little bit of information on its own specific frequency.
Some of these frequencies (or ‘channels’ is they’re known) are more effective than others, and still other channels are being actively interfered with by EMI- ElectroMagnetic Interference. EMI is everywhere electricity is used. Power lines, microwaves, cellphones, flourecent lights, margarita blenders- all of these produce enough EMI to affect the data coming through to your modem and throw the very sensitive data channels off their game.
When this happens, the system- either your side, at the modem, or the ISP side at the back-end, notices that the channel is messed up, and drops it from active duty. Most of the larger EMI issues are always there, and so the weak channels are trimmed out in favour of the strong. This can affect speed, but it improves reliability. Besides, there are usually lots of extra channels that can be used as backups if a few of them aren’t working out.
Generally, these closed channels will come back up after a while, and be retested as they join back in. But sometimes theres a glitch, and they aren’t reopened- ever. They just stay closed, and when your neighbor fires up their Blendermax4000 at 3am, even good channels can struggle, adding them to the ‘closed’ list. Over time, *all* of the channels can become closed; reducing speed to the point where the connection is barely keeping itself alive, if at all, anymore.
When you reboot your modem (often combined mechanically with a router as a single unit) you are telling it to rebuild the active channel list from scratch. It reopens all of the channels, and waits for them to tap out from interference again. This is why rebooting a modem often works -at least temporarily- to restore dataflow, even if the connection itself is in rough shape.
This same process occurs on the back-end, and so when you call into your ISP, they can re-optimize your connection through the same process, and ensure that your account actually has the system permissions it needs to get you your proper speeds. Most accounts are throttled in some way (for reliability, and to make sure there an incentive to upgrade) and the ISP checks to make sure you haven’t been over throttled by accident (i.e. wrong account type on the back end) or intention (i.e you didn’t pay your bill and got throttled to almost nothing so that you would call in).
If it happens a lot, and you notice the issue clears for a bit before getting bad again, it means that your physical connection- the wires and such used for your internet- are in poor shape and need maintenance. If it happens sporadically (every few months or so and then clears after reboot) it’s likely a software issue in the modem itself, or in the ISP backend. Firmware updates are the goto in solving these kinds of software issues.
All in all, it’s probably nothing anyone is doing specifically, and is likely just a natural quirk of the technology. Most ISP’s are trying to address these issues all the time- reliability is a huge driver. If it happens a lot, it could be something physical, which requires a tech to fix. Otherwise, keep on keeping on.
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