Why is it so slooow...

Have you tried updating to 10.1.4 through software update? My brother says his dial-up connection "worked better" since that update, though I don't know if he was referring to stability or speed. Also, if you're mainly noticing it while browsing the web, I'd suggest switching browsers if you're still using IE. I've found Mozilla to be faster, and people say the newer releases of OmniWeb smoke IE. You can find them both at http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/, which is a good site to find pretty much any software that is available for the mac, just for future reference.

Thanks for the advice Greg :)

there is a simple way to test the line itself, if you have access to an ftp server at your isp. if you ftp a large file (the larger the file, the better the test) to your isp, you can get a good sense of the line and how it is working.

i would do it from the command-line or using a real ftp client and not something like a web browser. after transferring it one direction, try sending it the other direction.

if you get good throughput using ftp and your web browser is slow, you can try other browsers as xchanyazy mentioned.

hope this helps,
mike