UPC 20mb struggling to load pages
For the last 4 or 5 days my house has been having a lot of trouble with our net connection. 20mb line UPC, close to Cork City Centre.
Pages regularly spend ages waiting for sites/content, but not every time. I have a paid radio subscription for radio commentery of my teams matches and yesterday couldn't use it as it was spending far more time inoperable than working, as was the same systems text commentery, and Sky Sports Score Centre. I ended up having to watch Aertel on the TV for score updates on my match. A few minutes ago it timed out when I tried to go from one page of a boards.ie thread to the next, and it does so regularly when on various messageboards/forums etc. I've not been able to use gmail chat in this time, and regularly have to take multiple attempts to load e-mails in yahoo mail. YouTube videos take forever to begin to load and many other sites are struggling to operate. We've had the connection for just over a month, and have had no such problems prior to this.
When I run a speedtest it takes AGES to load (a minute!?) then tells me i've a 58ms ping, 3600 kbps up and 800 kbps up connection. Grand in theory, but I clicked a youtube link earlier then nipped to the shop to find it was still waiting for (amusingly) pms.youtube.com!
There problems are appearing on Vista and XP on two different laptops. We mainly use wireless, though I also get the same issues when using the XP laptop on a wired connection. I shall be testing it with Ubuntu later today. Web browsers used are both Firefox and IE - and last two versions of each at that! Anti-virus is up-to-date and scans reveal nothing.
I had initially reckoned it to be a router problem (we're using the one we were given by UPC) but was talking to a friend in the southern suburbs of the city an hour ago, and he said he'd been having the same problems. This may be a fluke, but I have my doubts...
Does anyone know of anything that may be causing this, or have anything that will help?
Much appreciated,
AFC_1903
Oh, and it was 20-25 seconds of waiting to see the preview of this post - but hey, at least it worked!