After all the problems I’ve had getting my Vonage up and running to interact properly with my TiVo, I thought I had it totally fixed.

Yet all last week, I had horrible latency on my network, that was resulting in long pauses when on the phone, and then my web browsing became very, very slow. Not quite dial-up quality, but definitely not broadband. It was very frustrating, especially as I needed to get some stuff fixed on Apatheia.org.

Friday I brought home a different router to see if that would work. First I upgraded the firmware on my current router, and then went to check a website on my 2nd machine that does all my email and IM that I don’t use a lot for web browsing.

Wait – what’s that in the bottom corner of the screen below Firefox? Sure enough, it was a Bittorrent client I had open from the previous Saturday downloading OpenSuse. It had started really, really slow – 1 – 2k download. But it had definitely finished strong as it was now uploading at 40k / second – using all of my available 384k upload speed. Turn that off, and voila – all my latency problems fixed.

Whoops.