Sometimes, using the Internet, you get caught in a traffic jam. The effect you will see is very slow access, because you and a millions of other people are all trying to crowd onto the same freeway. Or, if it is bad enough, maybe part of the road is closed off for repairs, which makes traffic come to a standstill. When your browser finds that it can not access the address (called an URL) you are trying to get to, it continues to try until it eventually gives up, and tells you it can not connect. That message might say something like, "too busy, try later" or, "site not available", which sounds like it does not exist any more, but in fact it is just caught in a traffic jam.

What can you do about it?

It is not your computer, and it is not your modem. If someone tells you to get a faster modem to beat the traffic jam, they do not understand the problem. That is like getting a faster car to beat freeway traffic jams.

One answer is to travel outside the rush hour. The time of least traffic is between 2am to 7am EST, which is, of course, the small hours of the morning when you are probably sleeping, or getting up to go to work. Well then, that is probably not a useful answer.

The other answer is to change the route on which you travel. Between your modem, and our server, there is a route you travel for every single access. This route goes from your modem to your ISP (Internet Service Provider), then your ISP might route the access via a few of their servers, then out to another server, and so on, hopping across the country and the world, until eventually it arrives at our server. A dozen hops is common, twenty normal, thirty is not impossible.

If one of the servers along the way is down for any reason, traffic will be re-routed. That alternative route will not be quite as good (otherwise it would be used in the first place). If something major goes down (think of a cloverleaf closed for repairs) then that re-routing can add a lot to time to the journey.

If you phone your ISP to complain about slow service, chances are they will tell you that the problem is not theirs, it is somewhere else in the network. Then, what would you expect them to say, "Yes, we have too many people trying to use our system, perhaps you would like to be some other ISP's customer?" Of course, anyone you ask will say the problem is elsewhere.

An interesting site that you might find useful to monitor the Internet is the Internet Weather Report. This site presents ongoing animated scans of conditions within the Internet. It is designed to look like daily newspaper or television weather radar reports, except instead of being about real world meteorology, it is about conditions inside the Internet itself. The information is presented as geographical maps that show round trip time lag from their offices in Austin, Texas to thousands of Internet domains worldwide, every four hours, six times a day, seven days a week.

So which is the best ISP?

Unfortunately, this is not a constant. An ISP that is good today, may not be so next year, and vice versa. Also, good for what?

Can you call them locally? That makes your phone bill less. Can you call them locally from all over the world? That might or might not be important to you, depending on how much you travel, and on whether you want to get online when you are away. What kind of equipment do they have and are they large enough and have they been around long enough that they will be able to keep up with the technology or even be there next year. Not to mention, what do they charge for their services?

Unfortunately, we can not tell you who is the best. You might want to ask several friends that already have an ISP what they think of their ISP's service. Also, if you want to find out what ISPs serve your area, try the Internet List, an ISP list by area code within state.