Recently had a Fibre connection (well, fibre to nearest connection point, then copper). Ookla Speedtest consistently shows 40Mbs d/l 8Mbs u/l, yet we seem to wait an age for pages to open.

Films on demand seem available reasonably quickly and photo’s upload to Flickr pretty quickly.

What could be the issue?

Ta

Crap DNS servers or a poor ping time I’d guess?

Try changing first DNS server to one of Google’s (8.8.8.8) and see if it improves.
Keep an eye on what the browser says is going on at the bottom of the window – it could be waiting for a slow response from some stupid service.

Excuse my ignorance, but how the hell do I do that? ^^ 😉

When you run the speed test, what figure does it give for Ping?

Go to a command prompt, type the following:

ping www.google.co.uk (without the http:// bit, the forum is adding that)
ping 8.8.8.8

Note the time= figures and report back.

On speedtest the ping is 33ms.

Tried changing primary DNS to 8.8.8.8 and secondary to 8.8.4.4 in my router settings and it got infinitely worse

My Dad has fast fibre. It’s often slower than I get on my slow ADSL at home. Because his contention ratio is really poor. You might have similar issues.

They probably manage the traffic so that when you do speedtests it looks fantastic, and when you stream video it works well, but when you ask for web pages you aren’t timing anything so they make you wait.

Is it as bad on a wired connection rather than wireless?

Can’t check wired connection at the moment.

The connection seems up and down – one page will load instantly, the next will take an age.

Did a Speedtest this morning and D/L showed 36Mbs, Ping 19ms – upload speed shot up to 10Mbs, then slowly dropped and dropped, hanging at around 0.25Mbs, then lost connection altogether

Try buying a month of EarthVPN and connect to one of their UK servers. That will bypass any fiddling the ISP are doing to your traffic and will let you see if it’s that or the physical connection.

Can’t check wired connection at the moment.

Then it may well be a problem with your wifi rather than your broadband?

That would certainly fit with the connection dropping etc as that shouldn’t really happen on modern broadband.

Do you have a good wifi signal? Have you checked to make sure you don’t overlap channels with your neighbours?