In the morning through lunch its bearable but from 6pm onwards it starts to crawl, local websites are slow but international stuff is unusable.  Especially youtube's video data.  The youtube pages are OK but the youtube video data is worse than slow.

I emailed Slingshot 2 weeks ago when the international was unbearable all weekend and got this:

>>
Hi Craig

Thank you for using Slingshot's Online Help.

We had an outage over the weekend that would have affected some customers international browsing. Our engineers resolved this issue as fast as they could.

The outage has now been resolved and we apologise for any inconvenience caused.
I hope this helps to resolve your query. If it does not or you require any additional information, feel free to call us on 0800 89 2000.


Best regards

L
Slingshot Support
>>


but this seems different... more gradual...

it's not our data cap, it happens on all four computers (Vista, 2 XP, one Ubuntu, the first is wired, the others wireless)
it's not the router, this is the third one i've tried, and it's new and sometimes very fast.  I've checked with the slingshot speedtest and it's OK

a pair of IT degrees and 7+ years computer tech experience and I can't quite figure it out..

grrrrrrrrr... any ideas?

CJK