What Is Fiber
Likely

It's bufferbloat during peak hours.

Your speed is probably fine. Your latency under load is the problem. When one device starts a big download, oversized buffers in your modem and your ISP's gear queue up packets — and your video call's tiny time-sensitive packets get stuck behind them. Speedtest says 800 Mbps; your call still glitches. Cable plants are especially prone to this during 7–11pm peak hours.

Try this first · Free
Confirm it with the Waveform bufferbloat test

Go to waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat. Run it once at 2pm and once at 9pm. If your grade drops at night, you've found it.

If that doesn't fix it
Enable Smart Queue Management (SQM) on your router

Look for 'Adaptive QoS,' 'SQM,' 'cake,' or 'fq_codel' in your router's settings. A $99 mid-range router with SQM beats a $400 router without it for this specific problem.

Fiber would help here · secondary

If SQM doesn't help and bufferbloat persists at peak hours, your cable node is oversubscribed — fiber's bufferbloat behavior is dramatically better.

Check fiber availability

ZIP for quick check, or full address for census-block precision.

Now powered by live FCC data. Provider list comes from the FCC Broadband Data Collection (Dec 2024, via ArcGIS Living Atlas), filtered to fiber + cable + 5G. Coverage is reported at the county level — block-by-block availability varies, so always click through to confirm with the provider. Notice an error? Tell us.

Try any US ZIP — we query the live FCC dataset. Example: 29680, 78704, or 94110.