I'm in northern West Virginia, US and using Adelphia Cable. I get 1500 / 256 in general, but off peak I can get 1800 / 320.

For the first year I had broadband I was totally unaware that XP comes by default optimized for Ethernet LAN rather than high-speed Internet connections.

I got TCPoptimizer from Speedguide and fixed it right up. Been burning ever since!

im with NTL in the UK, it's 300k, i pay £15.99

woow, your internet is fast,

For that price you'd be better off getting OptusNet Cable. I'm guessing with the connection you have at the moment you'd be getting download speeds of about 50-60 kbps max? With OptusNet Cable you'll get average speeds of around 350 kbps... and in the right situations, speeds of up to 600 kbps aren't rare at all. The only down fall is the monthly limit, only 12 GB a month, unless you want to pay more. The other down fall is that this service is not available everywhere, which is why I had to give it up for this TPG 1.5 Mb connection when I moved to the other side of the city. This service isn't too bad, but I only ever see downloads get to about 160 kbps max at the best of times. Compared to OptusNet Cable, this is crap... although I guess the bigger limit of 20 GB a month is nice.

When I was back in India - I used to get my connection over cable lines (same as the cable tv lines). Their backbone was 512Kbps split over 100 homes I think. That left us with very little individual bandwidth - but even then it was at least 10 times faster than dialups and on 24/7. Never had to worry abou disconnecion and broken downloads. Hardly needed a download manager plus immense speed gains at night. Price was around INR 600 per month i.e. around $ 15.00 per month....which I believe was quite decent.

Tiscali: WORST ISP EVER

They were supposed to upgrade my line to 1mbit in JANUARY but they still haven't and now it's more like dialup than anything else with the 512 adsl line going at about 5kb/s download rate.

well iam with AOL in the united kingdom. everything is getting upgraded to a higher speed. right now i have 256kps for £18 but soon be 512kps speed. also its UNLIMITED download. its probably the cheapest i found in the UK with free connection fee and modem equipments. probably else where outside the country there will be fast connections with cheaper prices!

512Kbps shared between 100 homes? If everyone was using it at the same time you'd be getting your share of only 5.12Kbps. Now that kind of connection would totally suck, and I think I'd much prefer having a regular dial-up connection at those times. I think you must have your numbers mixed up somewhere, 'cause I know I'd much rather have a 56Kbps steady dial-up connection than having a 5.12Kbps connection. Could you imagine the download speeds you would be getting... something like 0.6Kbps at best. Either you were very lucky and only a small amount of them 100 homes were ever using the connection at the same time, or you have those numbers confused and wrong.
Either that, or I'm completely confused and have it all wrong. Either way, I'm fairly happy with my 1.5 Mb connection.

I have 8M/1M. My download speed is usually 400-1000kB/s. Upload speed is 50-130kB/s.

That sounds awesome man... I wish I could get those speeds here, but those sort of connections aren't even available to us here yet. As far as ADSL goes, the fastest connections available are the 1.5 Mb connections. If you want really fast speeds, you need to get cable, which is a bit more expensive and not available in all areas, and you also never get upload speeds of 50-130 kbps. 1000 kbps download speeds were also VERY rare with cable, so I'm guessing this connection you have is a lot better than the cable services offered here.
Wow, I'm very jealous. Hopefully soon we see ISP's offering these connection speeds.

If you want to see what your real speed is, use the link I posted in this tread. You can change the form around so it tests for the speed you are supposed to get from your ISP.

http://www.astahost.com/index.php?showtopi...indpost&p=18282

It will give you a benchmark to come back to.

Nils