Tapolyai - 1:18 am on Jan 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

In my day job we track dozens of sites with various products, but the cheapest and simplest is a variant on trace route.

Look for such tool on tucows or download/shareware/etc.

This is what it does - it pings/trace routes periodically to the same IP address, and calculates the latency between the hops.

These software packages with time (a few days) can pin-point which segment of the trip between your machine and the web site is consistently slow or changing. This would be a sufficient proof in my business case to force the vendor to make corrections, or loose my contract. I do not know your leverage with your vendors.

An other potential problem is --- cable companies are just that - cable companies, and not Internet infrastructure engineers. So some routing issues might have crept in. The persistent trace route will show this too, because routes will change within the cable company's cloud.