Wetlook World Forum

Going over to broadband offers no guarantee of success either; I've known a few people now with broadband connection problems, one of whom would indeed have cable drop out for many hours at a time (that was with Optimum Online in Westchester NY, he's since abandoned them and gone with ... Verizon I think? Another girl was with Adelphia I think in Utica NY and her connection used to drop quite a bit, again, she changed ISP, but to whom I forget) But everyone's experiences with the same ISP will differ -- I'm with ntl and I get a very good connection, the only problems sometimes relate to their Web proxy choking to death, but there is a trick to get around that, specifying another ntl proxy in the country as your OS's/browser's Web proxy. (Probably best used for just working around outages in case they don't like it :)

As far as broadband go, AOL seem to rely upon a program running on your machine to handle it, which can be known to eat up huge amounts of processor power and slow the computer down, which is stupid. To access cable, you should only need an Ethernet cable plugged into the modem, but PPPoE (Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet) support might be the cause of a slow and broken driver running on the computer itself. (Not that I'd care now, my broadband router would take care of that)

There's no simple answer, but no, what you're experiencing is pretty bad and that's not representative of what everyone else gets. You can do better than that!