Holiday slowdown

Has anyone else noticed a huge internet slowdown over the holiday? I normally get 5mb but since Dec 24 websites have been incredibly slow to open. In particular Yahoo mail is unavailable unless via 'front page' which I found on a forum. I use net for email, banking and research, no movies, P2P, gaming etc. Could it be the BBC downloads? Looking at the schedules I can't believe anyone would want to download this stuff.
Another subject: contents of all my emails from Dec 18 were removed by my AVG software, which is otherwise excellent. Fix is on the AVG forum site, you need to remove certification ticks. It's something to do with HTML rendering but I don't know enough to explain it.
Thank you for your brilliant forums, they are a great help to us rookies.
(posted by paropilot)

No slowdown here...who is your ISP?

Toucan (Tiscali reseller). I find them about the same as the others ... nobody's perfect!
posted by paropilot

but some are more equal than others...

hope it gets sorted soon, have a happy new year!

Try a traceroute to whatever is the slow site. Over the past few days some sites have had a routing issue whereby their packets take a whirlwind global tour of datacentres.