Any type of service such as dsl, cable or dialup is subject to a lot of variables. The biggest one is how many users are on at the same time. On friday nights you would not beleive how many users are online all over the world. As more and more users come online things will slow down somewhat. What I do is just break the connection and establish a new one. I normally hit a fast channel on my t-1 connection to start with but with a lot of traffic it some times get a bit slow. As more customers sign up for certin types of service, if the ISP and hub (that's the number you call to connect for dialup customers) providers don't upgrade their equipment, the service to the end customer will suffer...