Not everybody has cable or broadband. And even when you connect to somebody who has, how much bandwidth are they offering. And if they have a limitless no. of upld slots & they have over a hundred people uplding from them at one time then the bandwidth available to share around is going to get a bit small per upload slot. A worthy read about this: Slow Speeds (click on link) I had dial up modem for 3 years using LW & only upgraded to bottom level broadband 6 months ago b/c in this country marketing & available services & upgrading of services is much slower than say in the USA where it's been for available for much longer. There's also many countries in the world where anything faster than a dial up is an absolute luxury. Their country simply doesn't have the infrastructure to provide anything faster. For broadband it means upgrading everything to digital, including the phone exchanges, etc. Be it hard to imagine but the greater % of p2p users aroound the globe are dial up users. This will obviously change over time but this technology is still developing. And upgrading of services takes time, money & demand. Just some thoughts. Obviously there's a no. of reasons why slow speeds might be the result. Including one's ISP if they are filtering. And yes they are known to filter in both europe & in the USA to keep speeds minimal so the bandwidth is available for others & the company doesn't become overstretched.