(the following was sent via email by the original poster)

The problem is that my ISP here in the UK (Tiscali), is always being complained about in several of the forums I have visited for its service and speed etc, I must admit the service is not too bad the tech department are quite reasonable for a call centre in India, but the speed is up and down, to which I assumed was due to the volume of “traffic” on the web, and the connection times can vary from 5 min to as bad as 3 hour’s which for an “always on connection” is quite poor and annoying, so I decided to do my own research and tests which I could eventually pass on to the Tiscali tech team and try to sort something out, but to do this I must first be able to fully understand the results my self and try every thing possible to improve performance at my end of the line.

( ... many hardware specifications snipped for the time being as they don't have a big affect on PingPlotter results ... ) ... the modem is a USB Sagem [email]F@st[/email] 800, all drivers are up to date.

The test using Ping Plotter was carried out on 11/12/2003 between 02:09 am and 14:09, no uploads or downloads were made during this period, (due to being asleep), connection to the internet is via DUN

On reading the results the problem seems to be in between my PC and the first “hop”, but as to the cause, it may be my settings, my modem, the filters, the extension, a line fault, I’ve no idea, but any suggestions you make will be welcome.

( note from Pete: I resized this image and added the blue ellipse to highlight the area discussed in the response in the next post).