It's all good now. We had somebody from our phone service come and check. Turns out my dad didn't have a dsl filter on one of his lines. Now i'm getting about 166KB/s down. It's great
So for full understanding of the situation, I might as well tell the entire story.
When I first got DSL with Earthlink I had download speeds of about 40kbps. That was wired, and with an eHome (model: EH100) wireless router. At some point in time after the initial installation (months later), the speed all of a sudden boosted up to 160kbps, which was fantastic. Later, I decided to switch to an Airport Express (which is the model that is currently being sold). Did that, and worked fine. A day later, speeds were down back to 40kbps. I tried working with Earthlink to get the speeds back up. They just said to power cycle the modem and then to put it in bridge mode, neither of which helped at all. So I just lived with the new speed, hoping that at some point it boost up to 160kbps again.
A few nights ago or so, the speed boosted up to 80kbps. Whether it was going to stay at this, or boost up even more was unknown, but I was still very excited. Unfortunately the next day it went back to 40. Oh well. At some point though, it went down to about 23, 24kbps (these are all still download rates). It's been like this for a couple of days now, and it's very frustrating.
I've read around on the internet, and found out a bit about checking my connection strength. Found an article explaining how to first check my cables to and from the modem, and then directly with my Network Interface Device. Too bad I don't have a NID. That's about where I am right now, so here are my questions:
1. I know that there at least two jacks for the phone line I use DSL on. Any idea on where the line splits?
2. Got any other ideas? Earthlink support sucks, so I don't want to call them unless I know that they need to fix something on their end.
Thanks in advance for any replies, and thanks for even reading this far.
Here's the article I read:
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/browser/dslslow.html

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