Does your cable ISP suck?
stse: Here in Sweden some government agencies and a foundation (who also handles the TLD) developed a program called tptest, which measures your speed against a server: http://tptest.sourceforge.net/
http://opensource.iis.se/trac/bbk/browser/trunkNow there is also a flash application available (but probably not foss) http://www.bredbandskollen.se/ and commercial uptime monitors like http://www.pingdom.com