Suffered slow speeds at certain times of the day, usually when the kids get home from school and well into the early evening. If so, you have probably suffered from what is known as contention (sharing).

Contention is basically a Service Provider issue and not as a lot of people think a telephone line problem. If you can imagine, in the telephone exchange each group of 50 customers are connected to the same circuit board. This block of 50 customers are all sharing the bandwidth supplied to them by their Internet Service Provider. The likely hood of all 50 customers downloading together is very remote and normally does not have a dramatic affect on your service.

However this is only part of the picture. Due to competition rules, BT in agreement with the government regulator (Ofcom) has opened up access to all of their telephone exchanges. At this moment in time there is a rapid drive by Internet Service Providers to install their own Broadband equipment thus routing customers through their equipment and not BT Wholesale's. Now that The ISP's have control of their own virtual networks they can the dictate their speeds, cap downloads, set bandwidth restrictions etc.

Another important point to make is that when ISP's switch over to their own networks, do they have ample capacity to cope with the transition (adequate bandwidth). So in short check out broadband forums and make up your own minds.