I'm paying for Quantum Internet service 75/35, but lately I'm noticing that watching AppleTV and Netflix in the evenings is getting hard to do. It seems like between 9:30 and 10:30pm EST my FiOS performance is getting really bad. This causes shows to halt/buffer multiple times and is souring the entire viewing experience.
Here's my ususal (daytime) performance using Verizon's own speed test tool, which is what I expect:
And here's what I've been getting at night, about 3Mb/s or sometimes less:
As you would imagine, this is causing large buffering delays as I'm trying to stream HD content.
I know I can try to reduce image quality to minimize required bandwidth, but that's not the point; this is NOT the Internet service I'm paying for.
Please note that my AppleTV device is HARD WIRED to my FiOS router. Also note that I am not using the FiOS router's on-board WiFi; that's turned off and I am serving WiFI in my house via two HARD WIRED Apple devices (a time capsule and an AirPort Express). I am seeing this performance on all devices in my house at these times, whether they are wired or wireless. Also note that I'm getting this test from Verizon's own site, which is hitting their own servers, which means that the interface between Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc. and Verizon shouldn't have any bearing on the issue.
Of course all calls to support have been about resetting my router, rebooting the ONT, etc. and nothing is getting better. I am trying to tell Verizon that they need to test the performance/capacity of their MAN/WAN infrastructure, but the agent can't do that, and can't even do a loopback speed test through my router to confirm or refute the performance I'm seeing.
I don't know what else to do at this point, so I'll put it to the community. It looks like a lot of other people are seeing issues aligning with evening (i.e. prime time download) hours and I'm wondering if Verizon has oversold their capacity in my area (Tampa FL). They may have the fibers that can deliver a gig to each house, but if they don't have the router bandwidth and the backhaul bandwith to actually support it out to their network edge, it's a moot point.
Is there any way I can get someone's attention in the network engineering team at Verizon? At this point they either know they have a major issue and don't want to admit it, or have a local failure (bad PON card, loose connector, overloaded internediate router, etc) that they have yet to diagnose. The call center staff doesn't seem to know how to get to the bottom of this.