Maybe. You can check to see if your PC is properly configured for Broadband at the Broadband DSL Reports Tweaks page.

There could be several reasons--and most of them aren't your ISP's fault. 56K modems can only operate at 56K under ideal conditions, ones that the telephone system is incapable of providing. Even a small amount of noise can reduce the speed, and if the telephone company has a line-sharing devices called a DACS between you and the exchanges you may be restricted to under half the bandwidth that a telephone line can nominally provide. Similarly, if you have to go through a switchboard or over a particularly long connection you'll get a reduced throughput. In general, if you're getting over 40Kbps reliably you're probably doing as well as can be expected. Less than 33.6Kbps and there's probably something wrong - you may be able to get the telephone company to boost the line levels or investigate for other problems. If possible, try other ISPs or try your modem at another location, and talk to other people in your area who use the Internet: fault finding a lack of speed is a complicated business, and the more information you have before you go to your phone company, the better.

No Internet connection ever performs at 100%. When we test loaded our pages direct from our test Web server across a two computer 100Mbps local area network (LAN), our best result was 6.6Mbps (6667Kbps) - 33% loss of rated speed on the simplest possible network. These losses are inherent in the network infrastructure. Our test can only measure the time it takes the applications data--the actual data file--to reach your browser. Wrapped around that data is some overhead that can range from 2 percent to 25 percent of the total data sent. There's no way for the program built into the test page to control or discover exactly how much overhead was used to send the page's internal data file, but generally the percentage is small, and this page adjusts its figures up by 2 percent to compensate. Nevertheless, the actual overhead may easily be higher than that, resulting in a depressed value for the Kbps figure. Also remember that your connection to your ISP is just one part of the system that gets data to your computer. Between your computer and the server that sends a test Web page there are probably a dozen or more routers, communications links, and other network components the page had to travel through. Each of these components have a set capacity and speed at which they can operate, and most of them handle network traffic for thousands, even millions of computers every day. The inevitable result is that all Internet traffic encounters some sort of delay as it transits across The Net, and that reduces the amount of data that gets funneled into your connection in the first place. But what you see from the test is a reasonable indication of the sort of actual data speed you're getting - and that's what counts, more than the figures attached to your modem by the manufacturer.

The delay could be at your ISP, or it could be elsewhere as indicated in the above answer. But if you're consistently getting Bandwidth Speed Test results on both the local and remote tests that are substantially below expectations, the root problem is most likely your ISP's fault. While your dial-up modem, DSL, ISDN or other Internet connection may be a dedicated line, all of an ISP's connections get combined into one or more shared connections. In most cases, these shared connections have less capacity than the combined total of all the customer connections they serve - this is called the contention ratio, and ISPs can easily overbook their main Internet connectivity by ten, twenty or even fifty times. Done judiciously, this works better than you might expect. Since most Internet users spend more time reading their email and Web pages than they do downloading them, they're only using a fraction of their connection's actual capacity. Overbooking allows an ISP to combine several customer connections into a single link that's smaller (and less expensive) than the combined total of all the connections they serve, without reducing the amount of data sent to a customer when they are downloading data. The problem is that some ISPs, cable modem companies, and DSL providers take the overbooking concept too far. They funnel so many connections into a small combined connection that normal customer demand overwhelms the capacity of the combined connection. This is a particular problem during peak use hours, when line speeds can slow to a crawl. STRATA Networks has an overbook ratio of less than 9, a figure you will not find in many broadband and dial providers. Unfortunately, there is no remedy for this problem other than your ISP reducing the contention ratio. As competition in the high-bandwidth Internet connection business heats up, you'll have more options and your ISP will have more incentive to maintain more reasonable overbooking ratios. Until that time, however, your only options are to complain to your ISP or switch to another Internet provider with a better track record. We encourage you to compare ratios with other providers, ask them what type of connection they have to the Internet, and how many times that connection rate is overbooked. With our dedicated DS3 (45Mbs) Internet backbone feed, STRATA Networks just can't be beat.

Not only will you get different results at different times, but you will also get different results depending on which test site you use. Try them all and check out the differences. Like any major transport system, the Internet information highway has many ways through it and junctions, each with their own capacity and speed limit, and as with cars sometimes you get traffic delays. Just as you have to wait in a your car while other traffic goes through at a traffic light, data sent to your computer has to wait while other data passes through routers, the Internet equivalent of a junction, on its way to you. each location you visit will experience different delays at different times. You are more likely to run into slow Internet traffic during peak use hours than those times when fewer people are online, such as after 11 p.m. and before 7 a.m. Also, the traffic conditions at your destination may affect your speed - if you're using many American sites, then you'll get better speeds before lunchtime when the East Coast wakes up. When this page was being tested, we found results on a 512Kbps DSL modem varied from a consistent 400 to 500Kbps mid-morning and afternoon, all the way down to under 100Kbps during evening peak-use hours. If you really want to find out what your best possible Bandwidth Speed Test result is, try loading this page at 3:00am on a weeknight, when almost everyone is asleep and Internet use is at its lowest. (Friday and Saturday nights are not a good choice.)