Web Filtering and My ISP

[Matt D]

Lately - the past week or so - my internet connection is having trouble opening websites that are based offshore. U.S. websites are especially slow - doubly annoying as my email provider is U.S. based - Australian ones struggle, though UK based sites seem largely unaffected.
This is certainly a recent development. Websites that I usually visit daily, or multiple time a week are now virtually unavailable as they are taking tens of minutes to load/refresh. Websites on Indonesian servers, such as this are as fast as or even faster than ever.
I'm wondering if my server has imposed some sort of filtering protocol that's slowing things down. I've heard that the Government here is on an anti-porn crusade and even forced the company that provides Blackberry services to alter it's policy on network content.
Is anyone else having these issues?
I'm connected to an in house LAN style network that's supposed to provide up to 1mbps. I'll go nuts if I can't watch the Daily Show for much longer.

[roysingh]

Sorry to hear that bro.. But my isp never did any kind of filtering and I'm on their 2mbps dedicated package..

[Matt D]

Thanks Roy. I share bandwidth with everyone else in the building too so sometimes there are lulz due to traffic.

[roysingh]

Hope you sorted out your problems bro...

[mrtessster]

The filtered and banned sites have a message saying that they have been blocked. For a filtering system that is supposed to stop pornography there are a lot of political sites blocked. Even some of Telstra's sales and support sites in Australia a blocked. The point is, if there is no message the site has not been blocked. Speed throttling however, is another thing.

[Tokek]

Are you using your ISP's DNS servers? If you are, you may want to try changing it to Google's DNS to see if that's the issue, theirs is 8.8.8.8, or other public DNS servers, like OpenDNS.

I had a similar issue before and changing the DNS servers helped and I haven't had any issues since.