Faster, as in Slower

Do your major downloads off-peak. 2 or 3 AM is a good time to get som decent speed. That, of course, depends on where you are, and where the source of the data is...

which of course, includes the times during which ISP might be doing routine maintenance...in which cases progress rate goes to zero, load time goes to Web user infinity.

Although convinced that ubiquitousness of faster hardware speed invites supplier avarice/abuse (as well as organizational ineptitude - after all, programmers are not forced to endure the use of at they produce), I also sometimes wonder if the government (FCC and Homeland Security surveillance abetted by ISPs) might not play a role.

Then there's the factor, that as more people place demand, even at high speed, the harder (and slower) it is to meet the added demand. In terms of download service, there's a tradeoff poinr - profit or break-even-wise - at which it doesn't pay to additional service equipment; or even to defer downsizing of service facilities.

Are you sure the delay isn't due to more and more ad-ware parasites(ad.yieldmanager, pointroll, etc) that Yahoo and others are loading onto whatever page you look at?

I think a lot of it has to do with what was previously said, and regular advertising. The advertisements are getting flashier, larger, and sometimes harder to click off. Additionally anyone notice how they always load first? Always... Basically what has happened is every page has gotten larger, disproprotionately to the useable content on it. This is what is really slowing down the internet. It's akin to adding 20% more users to the internet without increasing the infrastructure of the existing system.

all post so far are good, plus, it may be taking as long as it used to time wise. But the files are a lot large.

One problem I see about downloading off hours, is thats the time kids are on playing games. sucking up bandwidth.

Another thing, and I think that is relatively new, is sites with tagged words that generate popups when your mouse merely hovers over them. To me, this is very irritating, so I stay away from those sites as much as possible.

The biggest bandwidth hog is video. VOIP and other audio can suck up a significant chunk, but by its nature, audio is smaller than video. On-line game playing is trivial by comparison - in order to get real-time performance, your packet size and latency needs to be small. Ads without video are puny - text is negligible, still pictures at least 5X smaller than a video stream (for 5 frames/second).

People downloading or streaming movies is what's slowing the internet down. Any real-time videoconferencing (as in that other thread) will also make a hit.

The big providers are coincidentally pushing more on-line video usage too, in the age-old marketing versus engineering dance. But Moore's Law still manages to apply, and the speed will catch up eventually, only to be outpaced by the next hot thing.

All good info above but there are two other aspects I haven't seen mentioned:

1) Much can be done to speed up Windows itself (all versions). No out of the box Windows version I've ever seen takes advantage of the full capabilities of a 1MB NIC, even if the router/modem/ISP allows that kind of speed.

2) Many ISP's have throttled back their download speeds and are now packaging higher speed levels for additional pricing. This is especially true of home ISP providers.

Then you have the idiotic IT manager like I have at my job. We have 1GB fiber optic connection to our ISP but he has us throttled back to a 1MB max connection because he "doesn't want us wasting our time downloading stuff we don't really need".

Soooooo, I go home and download my 2 and 3 GB engineering software updates on my cable connection.

Hooker

I do agree that the more on the service provider pipe, the more latency. You can also increase your web surfing and downloads by using an alternate DNS vs the default your ISP provides for you. I use OpenDNS and it is great. I really got frustrated with the DNS of Comcast Broadband. I got immediate better results and response times by going with OpenDNS instead of their inefficient DNS server(s). In addition to this I also pointed out to Comcast about an issue I found with their backbone and a crappy bounce they had and my call to their support was "Reset your Router"... I told them that I am an IT Professional and know the IP address of the bad bounce source that I found through trace route and by pinging through their DNS and then pinging through OpenDNS's DNS service the problem was gone with OpenDNS which routed me differently than Comcasts DNS. I got frustrated with trying to explain to them their problem...obviously people placed into customer service positions who dont have a clue about how it works. They just follow their flow chart of #1 tell customer to reset router, #2 tell customer to reboot computer, #3 is your modem on , and those stupid questions and directions.