This is prolly very stupid, but…
For about 4 years now, I’ve connected to the 'Net with first ISDN, then cable modem and then ADSL. As we all know, this board can be very sloooooow at times. Since I’m on a diferent time zone, I pick the hours to connect. Generally, US times 9-5 are the worst (roughly, since it stretches with time zones in the US).
However -
I’m changing ISP and connecting with the built in 56k modem in my’puter for a couple of weeks.
It’s faster on this board. Faster.
At every other site, it’s so slow it hurts, but not here.
Now, the stupid thing is, I’ve pondered if the SDMB have a priority on modem users (ok - slap your knee and laugh at me now), which seems preposterous - how could the server know what hardware I’m using -
It’s still strange though.
There is absolutely no practical way that you can give “priority” to modem users in a setup like the SDMB, or 99.99% of the Internet sites in existance have. It is possible, from a theoretical basis, but highly unwieldy.
Most likely what is happening is that you are getting a better routing through the Net from the new ISP. It could very well be that you were having an excessive amount of hops and latency with your DSL connection, and that the modem connection is better routed. This is nothing that the SDMB, or you, can practically control.
Another possibility is that the routers on your DSL were overloaded badly, and sloooooooow.
I was thinking along those lines, but it’s still weird, since this is the only place where I notice an improvement. And there is a big dif 'tween 56kb and 512…
In a week I’ll get 2,5mb (down) and 756kb (up) home though and in a year VDSL which gives 8MB (down) and 2MB (up) … I can’t wait…
The bottleneck here is usually at the Straight Dope server, not the routers or the end-user connection. In other words, it’s usually slow here regardless of what you do. But occasionally it’s a little better or worse, for no obvious (to us) reason (jdavis could probably figure it out, but it’s probably not worth his (very valuable) time).
So my guess is, it’s just coincidence that the hamsters just happened to get a second wind at about the time you switched.
Maybe they were given a better diet after the last strike / lock down.
Ok. I consider it one of the world’s minor mysteries, that will never be understood.
I bet it’ll be slower with my new ISP, though.
::gone::