Hi Everyone:

I have rogers cable high speed internet service in Toronto, Canada. I've had a problem since I've had it but have just ignored it and lived with it. Now i want to fix it.

I have very fast downloads. When I download, the speed is about 500KB per second. I just downloaded the fedora core 5.0 3gb dvd version in about 1 hour. That's good enough for me.

My problem is with browsing. it is slow. The same thing is in IE and firefox, so I don't think it is browser dependent. I'm using windows xp home and am connected to the cable modem using a netgear mr814v2 router. i also have VOIP using vonage. I've scanned my computer for spyware and (of course) viruses. no problem with either. i'm using Norton Internet Security 2003.

my symptoms are as follows:

-when i'm using tabbed browsing in firefox, i have to wait for one page to load completely before i load another page in another tab, or else the new tab (or even both) will tell me that the page cannot be found. this almost always (if not always) happens.

-on both firefox and IE, pictures (including ads) in pages take a long time to download. most of the time they don't download on the first try and i have to hit refresh to get the pictures, and often i have to hit refresh more than once to get all the pictures. examples are ebay, amazon. when i'm looking at CNN.com, i also get this problem and the browser seems to get hung up for a while at something called "akamai.com", which i'm assuming has something to do with an advertisement.

remember, downloading actual attachments is fast (which has been confirmed also with dslreports.com). the slow downloading is only when browsing.

i also have a friends site that i just tried to pull up yesterday for the first time that has a lot of pictures, and they all show up as empty links (the x in them) in IE, or as just a underlined hyperlink in firefox. i've hit refresh a number of times and none of the pictures show up. it isn't a problem with his site as i can look at it quickly at my office using high speed there (dsl).

I know that i will get nowhere with customer support from my ISP as they will look at the downloading and say that it is fine (the speed that is). the browsing they will blame on my computer, router, or browsers.

If anyone here has any suggestions or advice, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

Paul