I noticed that Demon internet now offer better contention ratios than most (all?) other broadband providers. We are currently with pavilion (part of the easynet group) and although speeds were great a couple of years ago we have noticed a steady decline in service - which is barely better than ISDN rates around Lunch times. I assume this is down to contention - although we also use their filtered proxy service which has been a constriction in the past and I suspect that they use a transparent proxy on the non filtered service (is there a way to test for this?) Not only might it be possible to get better bandwidth but Demon appears to be cheaper too (certainly less than we are paying Easynet for a 2MB service). Of course with contention ratios of 5:1 it could still be sluggish if the other 4 users are also heavy on usage (as would be many schools). They offer a 1:1 service - but at 600ukp per month it would be not be much more to go for a leased line and get the benefit of symmetric speeds. Anyone any comments on Internet access speeds (I know its not Linux specific - although we do use squid as our local proxy on a linux box). -- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School