I once explained Internet reliability to a crowd something like like this. It made sense for them because they were all school teachers. May not shine as bright here.
Surfing the Internet is like working in a daycare full of 2 to 5 year olds. Sometimes you can't keep up with them, sometimes they all take a nap. Sometimes the hyper kid can take a nap while the sluggish fat kid runs laps around the building. Each kid plays a part in the overall experience but no single daycare worker can expect to control every single kid at the same time, all by themselves.
If you are going to work in the daycare, you have to expect random results but if the entire daycare is unusually sluggish, you have a problem. Check for carbon monoxide. If one kid suddenly gets consistently slow when he used to always be fast, then get that kid checked out. If he is just taking a nap today but the other kids are fine, let him have his nap and go play with another kid.
In more realistic terms. The Internet is works by allowing all of the routers of the world to talk freely with each other, no matter what ISP owns them. Each router takes your information, checks to see where your sending it, then makes a decision as to what router further downstream it will send it to next.
This can happen many, many times from point A to point B. You travel through many ISPs and routers and any one of those hops along the way can get unusually busy or have a problem and slow things down. It is designed so that if any router has too big an issue, the traffic could travel another route and this happens often. The path you take to get from point A to B today could be very different from the path it takes tomorrow. The new path could be either more or less efficient for you.
This is in no way trying to diagnose any of the slow users problems above. Nor is it pointing or removing blame from any ISP, user or end point. I'm simply leading up to this.
My point,
I'm bored on a conference call and when that happens, I often type way to much crap on here.
My other point is that when Internet problems are inconsistent, It is very difficult for the destination site to track down the cause when just a few people are experiencing slowdowns.
While I know nobody above pointed fingers, it's very easy to say that "Axiom's sight is slow tonight." While semantically, that can be said to be true, unless it is slow for all users at the same time, the actual physical item out there that is slow is most likely something way outside of their control.
