Why the evening connection gets worse

[Fairman]

Why the evening connection gets worse

Many home connections slow down at night. The network of the internet provider is shared, and in the evening, when streaming and gaming peak, congestion builds on certain links.

The effect on trading is usually small in bandwidth terms, since a platform needs very little. But latency and packet loss go up. A ping to the broker that averages 20 milliseconds in the morning might hover around 35 in the evening, with spikes.

Peering arrangements between the provider and the networks that lead to the broker are the usual bottleneck. A congested peering point adds delay for everything crossing it.

For traders in sessions that overlap with evening hours, such as Asian or late New York trading from Europe, the issue is relevant.

Measuring at different times of day over a few weeks shows the pattern. A graph of the average and the 95th percentile of ping by hour makes it clear.

If the evening degradation is serious, a VPS is the standard solution, since data centers have better connectivity and don't suffer from residential congestion.

In a week of logs, does the ping to the broker's server show an evening pattern?