To avoid peak usage period on the Internet

Sometimes your browser might appear to be stuck while downloading a page. If your browser has a status line showing the progress of the download, you will sometimes see it freeze and appear to be dead. Stuck downloads or slow to response to your other requests happen for various reasons, one of these may be Internet traffic congestions. The solution is to avoid peak hours if you don't want to wait on the queue.

Just you probably want to avoid rush hour on major highways, you will be wise to avoid peak usage periods on the Internet. In the United States, peak periods are generally the middle of the day and early evenings on weekdays. You'll be surprised how much faster your response times can be if you connect during low-traffic times.

In UK, broadband access normally slows on weekday evenings. According to this article, there are other interesting trends:

• On weekdays, there is a sharp decline in speeds between 3pm and 4pm (school finishing time) followed by a levelling-off between 6pm and 7pm, which can perhaps be attributed to people leaving their computers for dinner.
• During weekday evenings, speeds are slowest between 9pm and 10pm, suggesting that this is when most people are using the Internet.
• The best time to venture online for maximum download speeds is between 4am and 7am.

You can find out when the Internet is congested by monitoring Internet traffic reports.

The Internet Traffic Report monitors the flow of data around the world. It use a test called "ping" to measure round-trip travel time along major paths on the Internet. It have several servers in different areas of the globe perform the same ping at the same time. Each test server then compares the current response to past responses from the same test to determine if the response was bad or good on a scale of 0 to 100. It then displays a value between zero and 100. Higher values indicate faster and more reliable connections.