chowmander

This is a bit off clie topic, but I dont know where else to go for smart answers from smart people.

Ok guys, heres my problem. For a long, long, time, I have had lots of trouble with my service provider shaw, cable internet. About 2 years ago I would say, its was dreadfully slow, so slow I tried to cancel and go for ADSL, but I found out becuase my phone lines were really old, it would cost a fortune to switch and rewire my whole house. So I stuck with cable and as of today, I have a router set up to 4 computers. 2 of them that actually use it a fair bit. Now, when only my computer is on, sometimes the internet will be fair to me, and work not too bad (still not "high-speed") but at least it works. And other times, it is just terrible, especially for cliesource. The pages wont load, i have to refresh 3 times before I get something to pop up. It is such a time waster, and to think I pay full price for this. I've complained to them a long time ago, and it seemed to have improved... but now its almost back to where it started. I swear that 56k is almost always faster than my cable. Average speed for my cable would just be slightly faster than 56k at its best. Now the service provider seems to vary from house to house, my friends seem to have blazing fast internet compared to me with the same provider. And someoen else I know who has ADSL has even faster (neighbour). I cant tell if my brothers internet is slow as well (i'll have to check when hes gone), but I assume it is. When i asked him, he doesnt give me a straight answer (kinda dumb lol), but I will find out soon. Now if my brother has kazaa on, and is not even downloading anything, wow, you should see my internet... It is just terrible, and when he downloads, its hell. But for some reason, my friends download huge files, at super fast speeds, and still have enough internet juice to view webpages. Yet I'm still stuck here, with crap *** internet.

Now these are all the possibilities that I have ruled out that could the culprit:
-service in my area is terribe and soemoen is hogging the bandwidth
-my network card is busted (but I would assume its either working or not)
-I set my computer as the DMZ host in my router settings
-I have norton internet sequirity running (though off I cant really tell much of a differnce (hard to judge sometimes))
-maybe my router is busted?
-cable not good
-badly networked


So, I dont really feel like changing network cards, and trying differnt slots in my router. I really doubt that anyting is busted or my network is not done correctly. I cant think of any other possibility. All I know is, regularly, I cant play a proper game of CS without my ping going from 80 to 500 every 5 seconds. Something is fishy here. Someone pleeeease help me. Is it possible my network card isnt working that well or a software conflict (doubt it).

Thanks guys, if all doesnet work out, I"m complaining to the service provider and I'm going to try and get ADSL again.

Any suggestions woudl be great!