Hi, i'm new to these forums and would appreciate all of your help.

I have bell high speed and it says i'm capable of getting max 5000mb download but instead i'm only getting around 2000mb download speed. When I call them I spoke to someone in Inda and they made me go through all of the usual steps (deleting my internet cache ...) and other such useless stuff and in the end they told me that I was too far away from the internet center that they have or something. Is it not possible for them to route it to me so that I can speed it up for me. I can barely hear/understand what the person on the phone says and I gave up after calling numerous times, should I just switch to rogers or another provider?

ADSL has one technical limitation, namely the further you are from the nearest CO (or remote dslam), the slower your speed. With Bell's service, you can get UP TO 5 megabits if you are at the right location. Third-party ADSL providers piggy-back onto Bell's copper wires for the portion from your home to their network. So they're only capable of providing the same speeds Bell is capable of.

First step, please post the diagnostic output from your modem. The items I'm interested in are attenuation and SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio). We can think about the next step after looking at the numbers.

Beware that the grass isn't necessarily greener with cable internet. Rogers is known to deliberately throttle down bittorrent traffic to below-dialup speeds. They are rumored to throttle traffic that LOOKS LIKE bittorrent. And if neighbourhood subnets are congested, you will get nowhere near the advertised max speed.

Thanks for your reply, I know this is a "noob" question but how do i get these diagnostic readings for you? Do I need to download a program?

It varies by modem. There's usually a web interface. Did Bell give you any instructions? Failing that, do you know the modem's model name? We might find the user's manual via Google.

Further to what I said earlier about cable not being problem-free either, see thread... http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=67686

I have the same problem with sympatico. My internet conection has been very bad lately and someone in India, who doesn't speak/understand the language well and uses a terrible phone conection, tries to help me. This guy might be doing his best, but it just doesn't work.