[ThePythonicCow]

peel open your wallet and pay for high-speed Internet access, would ya??

Easy. It is not the bandwidth that's the problem. It's slow on high speed lines as well. I'm on a T-3 right now (45 Mbits/sec) and FreeRepublic is slow. Once the FR server finally responds to a request and starts sending down the new page, all is well.

And as others have noted, it's not the pictures that are causing the load on the FR server. The FR server just sends down a few words of html that address some picture on a site such as Yahoo or whitehouse.gov, and then your PC directly accesses Yahoo or whatever to get the actual picture.

In the middle of the night, it's fine. But otherwise whether at work on this T-3, or at home on my DSL, the FR server is taking many seconds (varys alot) to respond (to even begin sending any data) to each request.

[RightOnline]

With all due respect, I'm quite aware of how "it" works (work in the design engineering group of a Fortune 10 computer company; nearly 20 years in the biz). All I can tell you is that I've seen nothing like this, either at work or at home.

It's entirely possible that if so many are seeing this problem that the ISP deserves some scrutiny.....OR......the server(s) are simply not up to the task with the (I'm guessing) larger hit count (more lurkers / members, increased hits due to the hot topics of the day, etc.).

I'm on two 100 megabit ethernet networks (work and home) and have zero problems.

[Grampa Dave]

I have friends with high speed access, and they couldn't access FR during the off times yesterday.

From the feedback on this thread, a few people with high speed access were able to access FR. Many were not.

Not all areas of America can get high speed access. Out here in KaliGrayland, we are under the thumb of the thugs who control SBC. I been there and it was not worth the extra money.