Slow internet - Nationwide?

So what's the status of the sun at the moment, as far as solar flares and such? I would look it up myself, but honestly don't know much about it. I wonder if this could be the problem?

Anyway, not too long after I posted earlier, my internet speed seemed to get back to normal for a few hours. Can't say that it's all that great at the moment though. Seems to be an intermittent thing.

Same deal here...I even made a comment to my girlfriend "now i *know* they're watching me...I made a thread about my internet being slow and it sped up!"

Unfortunately mine slowed way down too. It's back to being what it's been the past few days.

Internet speeds have been ridiculous in my Southern city. I have the 8mb service from the local cable company, but lately am lucky to get DSL speeds.

At first I thought someone in my house was illegally downloading large amounts, but after I blocked that type of traffic on my network, nothing changed. Due to loose network security of my neighbors, I even checked them to make sure there was no untoward traffic.

Cable company says it's all in my head despite the bandwidth tests (I'm a girl I'm sure I have no idea what I'm talking about). Interesting to see that it's not just us.

Same problem here in England. It's been affecting us for about 4-6 weeks where we keep losing connectivity altogether a fair few times a day. The weird thing is, the lights on my modem are meant to flash certain sequences to indicate what the problem is but when I check it, it all looks fine. Only way I can get it to work is to reboot the modem. I'm also finding it difficult to watch videos, bbc iplayer takes forever to load and same with youtube.

Has anyone else had problems with their mobile/cell phones too? Same thing happens with that, I lose signal completely for a few minutes at a time, a couple of times a day. I live in a well populated area and never ever encountered a loss of signal here until recently.

Edit: Just read back on the posts about phones! Is all very odd. Also, when I've attempted to call my Mum on a few occasions it says "we are unable to connect your call at this time", and so I ring the home phone and she can't see why it said that (she had full signal) and noone else has encountered that problem when calling her. Same thing happened when trying to call a friend the other day too.

I too will worry if we ever completely lose the internet and calls. With no way of contacting other people in the world, it'll be so much easier for TPTB to pull the wool over the publics eyes. If we only have the media to go by for news, we are royally screwed.

The comment someone has made about that ship has made me start to wonder, I'll have to go look into that abit more now. If they are sending three ships off with nukes to ports around the world then I can kiss my arse goodbye because I livein the town of the largest container port in the UK and one of the largest in Europe.



[edit on 20-8-2009 by JennyJen]

Thanks for posting this. Well at least I'm not the only one. I've got Verizon DSL an theirs times it's very slow an I also have the same problem with You Tube stopping an buffering when it gets near the end of a video. Thought it was just me. If we're trying to get a picture of the size of the problem, I'm here in NY.

My internet connection hasn't slowed, in fact it has sped up. Normally it runs at 32kbs but now it is at 37kps. The time of dial-up is approaching. Get ready!

Western NY here and my internet was terrible Saturday along with many stations on cable just being out. It has been much better but I am having similar problems viewing videos. I have Time Warner Road Runner, have Vista and use Firefox.

I wouldn't put it past them to screw with the instant information that is available. I pray that sancho is wrong, but he really does make quite a bit of sense.

If you want to experience slow internet speeds... along with the added bonus of crappy CS and download caps, try out some satellite. I promise you it's just as slow as always on my end here.

Well, as usual I can't be bothered to read everyone's replies to the OP so here's my two cents. Feel free not to read it. lol

I live in the capital city of this Northern European country. Normally we enjoy 100% internet and mobile coverage. There is virtually no place in this country where you're out of range. Yet recently, within the past half year or so, our ADSL and mobile connections drop many times per day. Our phone calls drop mid-sentence, irrespective of carrier. Our Net connection drops at the very least daily - that's if we're only online for a short-ish time. Sometimes we can't connect with the browser but web-based games and messengers work. And another thing that's becoming something of a nuisance is the constant updates. What's with that?!

Just to be clear, we run both Macs and PCs here, depending on our purpose.

OMG I was also having problems with cell-phones earlier and internet. I tried calling someone and my phone dropped like in the middle of the call.

I was having massive problems with the internet. It's back to normal speed right now. I guess I would have to be in the camp that TPTB wouldn't want us to access the information, so, they had to slow the internet down to keep us from having it.

My internet has been giving me problems since the beginning of this summer. Now it's suspiciously faster all of a sudden?



Now, why would the internet providers not deal with this problem right away? Why would they keep it slower- despite massive amounts of complaints about the service?

I thought it was just me... but apparently it was a nation-wide thing, and, now I learn it's a world-wide thing? It just seems really strange that the internet would go slow for the whole rest of the world all at the same time.

I don't believe in coincidences.

Just curious but does anybody else have facebook open when they surf? I noticed for me that sometimes when I have facebook open my IE sometimes freezes up for a few seconds and then loads.

Yep that happens with me on Facebook. I assume its Facebook loading up the applications (I dont have the farmville etc rubbish, just the default settings.)

Internet is majorly bad today, takes me about 5 minutes to load up any page, so you can guarantee that I've smashed my head against the keyboard a few times as I wait for my reply to load. I'm still having the same problems with my phone aswell. Very weird.

Haven’t looked at the web for a good three days because of slow load times and constant cutouts, not good for online gaming. This afternoon was ok but now it’s just as bad again.

Called my provider twice, first answer was you live in a high density area. Got my bill plan price cut in half (ok Score). Second time I call it’s not the same thing that’s doing it but I got no explanation other than we are working on it and have no timeframe on fixing it.

Now I come to ATS and find this thread. Hmmmmmmn. WTF

BTW I’m in Australia. Seems worldwide.

I found the same thing here in Australia and my 12 GIG down load for the month was disappearing in two weeks, and then slowing down to 56k .
I down loaded a program called net limiter and found out when I logged onto the internet as the server was going to a page of choice as it was downloading it was uploading at the same time and I traced the source to be my internet provider taking upload space.

We here in Australia get charged for uploads .

Since installing the program I am able to monitor net usage and limit uploads and have had no problems since.

hope this helps

Ocker

Well I am getting the same problem. I have a business internet line.

I supposed to get 15megabytes download and 5mb upload. When I test the speeds it's way low.

I am getting like 8mb speeds for download and 1mb upload speeds.

I am paying high bucks for the connection.

I am guessing this could be due to storms kocking down lines in the mid-west from nasty storms. I am not sure. It could be that their is high numbers that have internet and the network/line is cluttered with people.

It can be many things that could cause this. So assuming something is not good but tring to invistigate is a good thing. Keep your ears open for any possible reasons that could cause this.

I don't think it's the government trying to control internet and stop protesters videos or something.

I personally thinkg some ISP caused the problem and their tech people messed up somewhere down the lines and could create this problem.

I checked my internet connection and I would get 12 to 13 mbps for download and now it drop to 8mbps.

So something happened. I thought it was just my ISP issues. I know my ISP is doing some maintainance this monday at 4 am. Do you think they could cause this mess? I was alerted by their dns server when I was on the internet the first page they showed was a message saying monday they will do maintainance and this will slow down your internet speeds sorry for the inconvience.

It's possible it could by my ISP that caused the problem. I don't know.

well I hope we find out soon.

It was a nightmare here at work today and even worse since I got home. I'm trying to watch a streaming video and even though it is showing as fully loaded, I have to reload for 10 minutes, every 10 minutes to watch it. I never used to have this problem before.

Well, I guess I am tempting Murphy's Law with this post.

Whatever the reason is for all these interuptions, those behind the reason must think I am pretty damn special, becuase I have had no problems at all at any time.

Now watch, I post this, and I'll lose my net, my cable TV, and my phone

I'm in Southern California and we've had horrible internet service for the last week. My husband suspected it had something to do with the router or maybe neighbors piggy-backing but after re-installing everything and changing the security settings our connection is still horrible. We cannot watch ANY videos without it stopping every 20 seconds and buffering. A four minute video takes a minimum of 10 minutes to watch. It's incredibly frustrating and annoying!

Now that I see we aren't the only ones with the problem you can be sure I'll be calling my cable company (Time Warner) and asking what's up with the DSL service!

Jemison

Originally posted by Jemison
A four minute video takes a minimum of 10 minutes to watch. It's incredibly frustrating and annoying!

Just don't let the video time be the tell-all of your speeds. Yoiur download speed is only as good as the upload speed of the server. When YouTube, for instance, has its 37gajillion viewrs all watching vids at the same time of the day, EVERYONE'S download speed is screwed for a video.