Thanks for the reply David91.

I changed service providers when I went over to ADSL. My ADSL provider is a normal commercial provider (ozemail). It can't be anything to do with firewall as I didn't change anything in Norton's Internet Security - and I don't play around with port configuration anyway as I don't know much about that.

I am considering contacting my new service provider and putting the question to them.

What I have noticed is that if someone is trying to upload there is a timeout. And this often happens when I try to download, although occassionally I get a download connection. Generally speaking I am having less success with downloads since changing over from dial-up . The download speeds are much higher of course when they occur.