2-5Mbps?! Out here in the countryside that's a good day! I recently had a bout of serious internet issues and was down to 20Kbps, dial up would have been faster!
Hope it gets sorted for you soon though Kev!
Can I borrow a couple Mbps? I get 7Mbps max and had ~56kbps for half a year when they didn't repair a line correctly. I'm really glad my isp got bought out by a bigger isp, maybe my service will improve.
Hopefully your isp is better than mine and they fix it soon. My isp suffers from 'cranial rectalysis' when it comes to solving problems, hopefully yours doesn't too.
ah, welcome to my world...sometimes I think that dial up would be faster (but now I hear that the phone company wants to do away with not only my landline but my internet as well....so I might have to send up smoke signals instead soon)....because we have the old copper wires the best we can do is 6 and 3, never have had either...only on the speedtest did we get 5, normal is in the upper 3s (and yes, my hubby works at home on this as well).
My worst troubles on my 7Mb/768kbps line all started during that halloween blizzard in the northest usa a few years ago. It was that storm that started my issues. A line came down and they did a bad splice fixing it. 90% of lines here are copper, there is only fiber on some main lines, none to any homes. The 'fixed' line had 66% packet loss and as a result horribly inconsistent pings. During that halloween I somehow managed to stay in gw, my traffic must have been rerouted to some extent...
I VQed Dalada Uplands with an in game ping of up to 180,000ms, yes 3 minutes, idk how gw didn't boot me out. I would notice my heros stopped and keep going, I would scout where groups were, then what can only be described as "the rubberband from hell" would happen and BOOOOOIIIINNNGGG back to my heros I would go.
Inconsistent internet is the worst, slow but stable is better-ish, best is getting what you pay for. It just plain sucks when they can't figure out the problem. Have you tried something like traceroute? Ping Plotter works better than a plain old traceroute, it does ping and packet loss for every hop with a better gui than a command line interface. It's the only thing that got my line fixed, they kept saying everything checked out fine until I used it and told them exactly what hop the loss was happening at.
My worst troubles on my 7Mb/768kbps line all started during that halloween blizzard in the northest usa a few years ago. It was that storm that started my issues. A line came down and they did a bad splice fixing it. 90% of lines here are copper, there is only fiber on some main lines, none to any homes. The 'fixed' line had 66% packet loss and as a result horribly inconsistent pings. During that halloween I somehow managed to stay in gw, my traffic must have been rerouted to some extent...I VQed Dalada Uplands with an in game ping of up to 180,000ms, yes 3 minutes, idk how gw didn't boot me out. I would notice my heros stopped and keep going, I would scout where groups were, then what can only be described as "the rubberband from hell" would happen and BOOOOOIIIINNNGGG back to my heros I would go.
Inconsistent internet is the worst, slow but stable is better-ish, best is getting what you pay for. It just plain sucks when they can't figure out the problem. Have you tried something like traceroute? Ping Plotter works better than a plain old traceroute, it does ping and packet loss for every hop with a better gui than a command line interface. It's the only thing that got my line fixed, they kept saying everything checked out fine until I used it and told them exactly what hop the loss was happening at.
I have done Cisco's CCNA 1 through 4 (Cisco Certified Network Associate) training course, which teaches you just about anything about the internet and how it works on a very technical level.
I'm without a doubt better educated on the matter than the employees of my ISP...
It's just completely out of my hands, the issue seems to be that the modem reverts to completely wrong configurations or that the network box in my street is malconfigured and is causing the issues - that is at least what I expect - everything up to the physical layer (OSI-7) goes through normally. So now I have to suffer through their support 
My speeds are artificially low, the connection itself is good, but due to this the speed and quality are just unreliable. Everything lags like hell.
A slow speed is bearable if the quality is good enough, but this ís hardly so.
And command line for the win ;3
Tech support is always a horrible experience. A month or so ago my phone and internet went out for no apparent reason. No dial tone and the modem would fail to connect. Long story short is they blamed the home wiring and yet it was fixed without them ever stopping by. I was wondering wtf had happened so I called the local office rather than the tech support number and actually got an honest answer... "There was a leaky seal on the one box we didn't replace yet on ___ St. so it filled with water."
One would think that since you pay for their service that they would,idk, serve you. Every isp I've had has had their own set of issues. My current one has a few thousand customers that have a certain model modem with a known flaw, after a while ppoe will fail and then reconnect, then fail after a short time, etc. They know it is those modems yet will not just send everyone a new modem, it's not 'cost effective'. They figure most ppl don't use their service constantly for large transfers so most people will not notice the problem and if they notice it usually reconnects for a while and they forget about it. The only time they replace the modem is if the customer complains about the modems connectivity issues and says they have watched it disconnect and reconnect XX times in 24hrs would the isp please replace their defective modem.
I think there is no such thing as 'customer service' any more, there is only '¢u$tom€r $€rvi¢€' where the dollars and cents of their bottom line comes first and the customer comes second, or even last below everything else.
ah, the internet....just like driving in traffic: you can only go as fast as the slowest car in front of you.
we have the same issues here....dropped packets (and then you watch the hourglass just rotate.....) and slow speeds (which is not what I am paying for and why we have not moved up to a faster speed, damn old copper wires).
can you get him to come to my place next 
