Huge Ping Problems with 56k?

[SevenUp]

I'm going to get cable soon, but right now I have even bigger problems: since yesterday evening my 56k lags extremely bad. I tested 3 things so far: Pings in Half-Life (+ Mods) and Diablo ii (in Half-Life all servers had 4 green dots or worse, 500-700 ping ingame, in diablo ii 370-700+). Right now I'm trying to download a file with 2.50k/sec, I usually got at least 5.00k a sec on that site. What is wrong? I'm using MSN, never had this problem before. I didn't change ANYTHING in my network settings (only yesterday I changed the connection in Half-Life to DSL for a sec, but that shouldn't affect anything else). Oh, and our neighbor moved out yesterday and we got a new one (living in an apartment), maybe the new neighbor is sipping on MY connection? Maybe that's a little too far-fetched.

Any ideas?

thanks

EDIT: is there a way to test the ping with some programm to make sure?

 

[Garion]

Analog modems are flakey. No doubts about it. You might only really be connecting at 24K, not 50K+ and don't know it. Speed can be affected by a lot of things.

If you're looking for a "where are my long pings coming from" tool, download Ping Plotter from download.com - Cool tool.

- G

 

[SevenUp]

How can I make sure that I'm connecting at 56k instead of 24?

 

[SevenUp]

by the way: that tool doesn't help me at all. All I can do with it is check the speed of website's. Can it be that I accidentaly changed my 56k to work like an 28.8?