Then I went to one of my tv sites and started to download a program. This is what I call the real world speed and it's what matters to me. When we had DSL I would tell my next door neighbor that I was only getting 2MB/sec down and he would tell me that I must have some kind of a problem because his speed was 10 times faster than mine. We were getting the same speed, just describing it differently.
Seems pretty identical to me.
In this case, my first impression is the bottleneck is on the other end. Quite often, it is. No matter how fast your speed is, going through a maze of congested routers on the net will produce slow results. I would test it against other websites other than the ones you are having problems connecting to. See how fast you can load pages from Amazon, MSN, etc.