Internet report: September 2026

Example Internet Fast 300 · $70.00 a month · 123 Main Street, Springfield

September 1 to September 30, 2026. Watched for 593 hours of 720 hours (82%).

What we found

• Evenings were slowerBetween 7 and 11 pm, when the most people are online, the median download dropped to 175 Mbps, 58% of your plan's typical speed. A slowdown at busy times usually means the provider's network is overloaded.
• Your provider had outagesThe internet was down 5 times while your router kept working, 3 hours 27 minutes in all. The longest lasted 2 hours 14 minutes, starting Sep 17 at 9:40 pm. One of them lasted under a minute.
• Download speed was below your planThe median download was 248 Mbps across 149 tests, 82% of the 300 Mbps typical speed on your broadband label. 66 tests came in under 80% of it.
• Lag jumps when the line is busyLag rose from 23 ms to 161 ms during downloads. A big rise like this is called bufferbloat. It makes calls and games stutter whenever someone downloads.
• Home network dropsYour router, Wi-Fi or this PC's connection dropped 1 time, 6 minutes in all. These don't count against your provider. If the router or modem is theirs, though, it's still their equipment.
• Lag matched your planThe median round trip was 22 ms, against 22 ms typical latency on your label.

A fair credit to ask for

Download speed by day

Each bar is the median of that day's tests. Amber is under 90% of the typical speed on your label, red is under 70%.

Outage minutes by day

Only outages while your router kept working, so the fault was past your home.

Every outage

Every speed test

Your plan, from its broadband label

How this was measured

Every five seconds, ISP Watchdog checks that the home router answers and that the internet answers, using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 and Google's 8.8.8.8. Two failed checks in a row, about ten seconds, count as an outage. If the router kept answering while the internet didn't, the outage was past the home, on the provider's side.

Speed tests run on a schedule through the day and evening, about 5 a day, against a Cloudflare data center near you. Each test downloads and uploads over several connections at once for up to eight seconds, stopping sooner once the speed holds steady, and leaves out the first moments while the connections speed up. Lag is a ping to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, first while the line is quiet and again during the download and upload.

Tests are skipped when this PC is already using the internet heavily, when a VPN is on, and when the PC isn't on the home network. The report uses medians, the middle value, so one unusual reading can't swing the result.

Wi-Fi and the PC's own network link can limit a test. Each test records how the PC was connected so you can see this, and tests that the PC's link held back are left out when there are enough others.