Hi all, I've been pulling my hair out for the past week and a half. Suddenly our bandwidth dropped off. I'm on a 20MB connection and normally get 1.5 to 2.4MB/s download from fast servers like the BBC and Sendspace.com where I have a premium membership. I began to notice speeds of 93K, 21K, and on one freaky moment 4Bytes! After 6 phone calls to the lovely outsourced call centre. During which, I explained the drastic reduction in speed. Coupled with the fact that i had noticed I was losing packets. One 1st line Agent was able to see when he pinged my cable modem this was indeed happening. That it wasn't my hardware or the 6 computers I had at home. That I did know a tiny bit about computers and had confirmed that not only there was no hijackers on my WIFI, but that it didnt' make a difference whither I had my Netgear Router in the mix or was directly connected to the modem. Then after my ISP botched and ordered me two replacement modems the speeds flew back up to normal and life went on. Today i noticed during mudding lag had started again. I also noticed using Ventrilo I was getting insane ping rates. In the thousands. I started some ping tests again. pinging on wifi, 36 pings, 28 recieved. min - 22ms, max 480ms, avg 46ms Is this normal and should I expect a loss of packets on WIFI when i'm getting full signal, (as I was sitting beside the router, have all my WIFI gear bar the IPhone as N Adaptors). I did lose approx 1 packet out of the standard 4 packet Windows ping test when connected to the Router wired, and the modem wired, this afternoon. I'm trying to figure out how to establish what is the problem and minimise my own expense in the process. I can take a hit on time but I dont' want to go out and buy a new router just to test. Should I buy all new Ethernet cables? Demand my ISP send an Engineer out to check the cable box, and pay the £30 fee if all's fine? Is there any decent networking troubleshooting tools you all recommend? At first I thought was because I was messing around with creating my own 2K8R2 server networking at home, then i realised it wasn't just the Server and the one laptop who was using it as it's Domain and DNS that were having problems. Web Pages were/are loading slowly. I've ruled out viral and malware infaltrations. I know no WIFI encryption is full proof but I'm using WPA2, TKIP, ASE, MAC Address Filtering, hiding the SID, checked the client tables on the router to see if any non-recognised addresses are popping up. I'm at a loss as what more to do and don't want to go back to the ISP without as much concrete evidence as possible. BTW. I know they do throttle but this is for peer to peer s'fers between set hours. They say streaming, and browsing will not be effected. It's Virgin Media in the UK. Cheers as this is driving me mental! Barry