"I can get online, but slowly"

These are best handled by contacting Internet Support, though there are some things you can do before calling us.

• Plug directly into the DSL modem. If you have a router (especially a wireless one), try to take it out of the equation. Plug your computer directly into your DSL modem (customers with Paradyne 6310 and 6350 modems will need a cross-over ethernet cable to do so) and see if you experience the same problem. The same holds true if you have a hub or a switch. We've had countless customers that were experiencing slowdowns because of traffic on their network (plugging into their hub/switch/router would be slow, plugging directly into the modem would be fine). In the case of customers with wireless networks it has often been caused by their not having secured their network, so their neighbors are using their connection!
• Check the network activity on your computer. If you are running Windows 2000 or XP, you can go to the Network Connections in your Control Panel and double-click on the Local Area Connection. This will bring up a window similar to this:
  
  The bottom portion of this window will show you how many bytes (or packets on some systems) of data have been sent and received on this computer. Quite often when customers are having speed issues (either on DSL or dialup) going to this screen will show a large amount of outgoing traffic. If you bring up this window and the number underneath Sent is climbing at a steady rate--but you don't have any programs open that should be sending data, such as outgoing email, uploading files somewhere, etc.--then your computer likely has been compromised in some way. It could be virus-related, spyware, or even a legitimate program that is failing and pumping out a bunch of traffic that it shouldn't be.
  If you have more than one computer on your network, repeat it for as many computers as you can. If you find one or more systems that are behaving in this manner, it is recommended you have an authorized service technician take a look at those computers immediately.
• Eliminate devices from your network. It could be that you have Windows 98 or ME computers on your network, or that you have all Macintosh computers, or some other situation where you have devices on the network whose traffic you cannot monitor. In these situations--and even in situations where you can monitor but aren't finding anything--the next step is to try eliminating devices from the network. Turn every device off except for one computer. Once this is done, reboot your router (if you have one). Once the router is back up try to get online. See if you're still having the problem. Surf for awhile, and when you're sure things are working fine, turn on another computer and wait some more. Eventually you may find that when you power on one computer or device you begin to have problems. You've now isolated which device is causing your problem and can take the appropriate steps to resolve it.
• Do only some sites/applications go slowly? Many customers run speed tests online to determine their speed. There are a few things to keep in mind about speed tests. The first is that ACD.net is not responsible for speeds outside of our network. In most cases you can do the same test 5 times in a day and get different results each time. Speed test results do not only factor in your DSL line speed, but also the speed of the network the test is being run from, resources being used on that test server, and other factors. At the time of this writing (October 2005) the most consistent test we've seen has been the Nibble Info Systems test located at http://performance.toast.net.
  Factors on your home network and even on the computer itself can also affect these results. I just ran the Nibble test (F-16 Fighter Jets) on two different PCs on the same DSL line. Our equipment reports the DSL is connected at a speed of 13mbit down and 1.4mbit up. On one computer--a top-of-the-line performance gaming PC--Nibble reported my DSL speed is 8mbit. On the other system--a 3-year-old Pentium 4 workstation system--Nibble reported the speed as 3mbit. However on each system I could download antivirus updates from Symantec at over 1 megabytes per second (a 7MB file took 5 seconds to download), which would indicate a speed of over 10mbit. If some things go slowly, and some things go quickly, then the issue is not on your DSL line.
• Contact technical support. If all else fails, give us a call. We can look at your DSL line and see what it's physically running at. Sometimes line conditions cause errors on the lines, and that results in a slowdown (we'll be able to see that on the equipment), and a ticket will need to be opened to service the line.