Hi.<br><br>5000 ms ping times are pretty common on a dial-up when under load (ie: you're saturating the badwidth). With a regular dial-up line, you'll see high ping times *OFTEN* due to this being your bottleneck. During these periods of problems, do you have any other applications transferring data? <br><br>If your computer isn't doing anything else, the troubleshooting between you and hop 1 (the modem line) is a tough one to troubleshoot as your hardware plays into the mix quite heavily. It could be a configuration problem on your end, or it could be a configuration problem from the ISP - or anything in between. I'd probably start out by connecting to a different ISP to see if the connection quality is similar. One of the free services like Net zero should work well for this - or use one of the free offers from AOL, compuserve, or another similar network.<br><br>With ping times of 5000, it's likely it's not the physical phone line. If the quality was that bad, you'd be getting completely dropped connections. If there's no possibility that you're saturating your bandwidth yourself, then my next efforts would be spent on determining if it's a problem with your local hardware or configuration (on your laptop(s)).<br><br>You didn't offer a lot of information on the problem (no performance graphs, no stories about connection problems, or how often the performance is acceptable). More information could help diagnose this better.<br><br>