just a bit of a feeler really

Since before xmas my internet connection seems slower than usual i seem to be getting a few "this page cannot be displayed" messages as well

gaming seems unaffected i run a few various speed tests which give wildly varying results. I have noticed this in work as well

It seems that web pages such as e bay and briskoda take a while to load when they used to be much quicker

I've done the disk clean up which doesnt seem to help.

Just wondering if any one else has noticed a general slow down on the net lately

Yes, I have noticed it to. Im on 8meg I think, but I am sure it used to be faster than it has been lately.

Yes, I've noticed a distinct delay after every click that wasn't there before - My ISP is usually Virgin BTW.

Yep, mine has been slow too. Seems to be random, some days its fine, other days it crawls.

so its not just me then i kinda put it down to the xmas rush people buying online and business's tryig to get things down asap

but it still seems to be slow

I've noticed a few drops lately, and speed yesterday was crap.

I'm with Pipex

Im with NTL at a measly 1 Mb connection, which is fast enough for me tbh, as I just use it for surfing and the occasional online gaming & downloading music.

No problems at this end. However the intra network went down at college today which narked me

where i live i can only get 512k normally because of how far away i live from the telephone exchange, but recently i've actually been getting higher speeds than normal, iirc it was 738k the other night..... apart from that it seems to be running fine, with virtually no dropped connections, and the speed seems quite stable

mine's fine too, the occasional slow loading page but nothing worse than normal

My wireless laptop seems ok but the connection a work was instant last night.

I guess it helps when you are the only one on the network.

so its not just me then i kinda put it down to the xmas rush people buying online and business's tryig to get things down asap

but it still seems to be slow

Just before Christmas it was slow and between Christmas and New Year was slow too. The broadband connection at work though this week has been really slow, it took nearly 30 minutes to get onto the BBC news web pages. The Travelwise web yesterday crashed due to that many people trying to get travel news updates.

it's just contention with more people using their connections for longer in the pre xmas and the evening busy periods.

I'm on 10Mb with NTL and have been waiting 3 weeks now for them to swap a cable modem out, currently running intermittently at around 2MB with the odd 10Mb spike.

Their customer service is getting worse (and I thought that was not possible)

I am bordering on telling them to stuff it, but then I need to look at a high speed provider because when it was / is working at 10 it's great and it would be tough to downgrade.

any recomendations?

Dont forget all that your connection is a shared connection usually at a ratio of 20:1, some providers are 50:1( check your provider).

So if youre getting slow connections & timeouts, it could be that you are running at the full ratio on your connection.

Dont forget all that your connection is a shared connection usually at a ratio of 20:1, some providers are 50:1( check your provider).

So if youre getting slow connections & timeouts, it could be that you are running at the full ratio on your connection.

Your home use will always be at 50:1 on the BT network and business lines at 20:1, this however is a contention you will almost never see affect you.

More of the problem is many of the less expensive (read not

my contention ratio is 1:1 according to my mate who works for BT

Depends on where mate...

As i said you are officially at 50:1 from the BT exchange to your house, but you will never notice that (for the reason you mentioned above).

It's the ISP that are the cause of most the problems.

no mine is slow enough as it is, my mate works for open-reach/networks, and he often works my local exchange... and he's done something to a router(whatever that is??) to make it so i'm the only subscriber on that part. but then i only get 512k on a good day anyway(with the wind in the right direction....

see the word *officailly* tom

I used to work for an ISP there is officially and officially, it's amazing how frequently these routers have errors that cause low contention lines

i'm eating my words tonight!!! i've had loads of dropped connections and it's annoying the tits off me