It was both them and me.

MDM Cablespeed came out and checked the line again from the house out.  Nothing was wrong, but they re-did the connections to both flors and put on a new splitter.  It's now showing 0% packet loss.

Showed the guy the slowness on web sites... and he's promptly confused.  Directly connected the laptop to it... same thing.

It's not the line, so if ether a faulty router or I'm mistaken over my area.  So, recheck with Mom's Windows PC...

...and it works.

The firewall, neobast, runs kernel 2.4.  Tygris and redwolf run 2.6... but redwolf can run 2.4.  What happens if 2.4 running redwolf connects out?

2.4 works.  The problem is 2.6.

Is it Explicit Congestion Notification?  Nope, that's disabled.  SSH can imitate a SOCKS server, though, so SSH into neobast so I can get out on tygris... and Google for a reason...

And there's a line on top of ECN -- dynamic windows sizing.  Oui!  Disable that, and it's fast.

The Internet sucks.