[ale] [OT] DSL and latency

[PairOfTwins at mindspring.com (PairOfTwins)]

All:

A friend on Earthlink DSL, eight miles from my own Earthlink DSL, had 
lousy speed tests despite all our complaints.  NOW her Mac gets over 
3000 kbps at speakeasy's speedtest.

However, when sites took 10 - 20 sec to bring up any content, I did a 
bunch of pings:

yahoo.com   ave 1313 ms, 12% loss
2wire.com  ave 1661 ms, 4% loss
earthlink.net  ave 1466 ms, 0% loss

while my own Earthlink 3 mbit connection shows ave 85 - 140 ms, with 0% 
loss.

So, is Earthlink correct to blame the wiring in her home, or is it 
really their problem???  [note: all phones have filters]  My googling 
hasn't provided much to go on.

Thanks,
Tom