Connections are a three-way street; Your PC, the ISP server & whatever target destination you're trying to reach... but i'm fairly sure you all knew this and yet,
The entire connectivity grid is highly dependant and a few key triad_mega_nodes which are strategically located between the many different core ISPs out there. Nobody can fit in without having to snap along this juggle feed through. Some of it might (at times) be soooooo busy with junk mail, piracy, Spam botters & what else that they just happen to be clocked out of the relative switching paths WHEN you simultaneously (as many thousands more every split second of each day!) ping around to connect at the routing flows exclusively aimed at that specific single com call only. Add the crc checks, the rapid but sometimes noticeable lag in remote areas, throw in a few unstable electrical supply infrastructures (yep, that DOES require energy too)... and you'd normally get a direct speed matching YOUR modem and other devices.
Over the last two weeks, Googgle would continually pop me into the wrong connections -- i pretty soon realized i had a Trojan DNS changer lurking around along with its darn Rootkit pusher stuff ON my solidly monitored PC by ** the** Symantec AV. Not so, it seems.
Uninstalled the Norton security program (so they claim) and switched back to an AVG free copy -- and by & wholly luck of a guess what... it DID purge what was hidden all that time when i trusted the other corp to protect me.
My point being... you may have a Virus in your machine, check the browser versions, do yourself a favor and install HiJackThis (scans registry for terrible stuff MISSED & completely ignored by some AV programs) to verify most win registry clugs.
Seriously, nothing can possibly be wrong with the Internet unless a super Hacker got around the triads mentioned above and even so, it'd take about 5 or less seconds to catch the weird but silly geek(s).
