Eugene's observations

It is sometimes interesting to know how your broadband service is varying over time, or perhaps check on the quality of your line graphically.  Three free tools that help this are

Jack Dinn's AutoSpeedTester available from http://www.gmwsoftware.co.uk/  This displays in bar chart and log table modes the upload and download speeds every few minutes.  Also, usefully, the PING and Jitter.  There is a performance hit when you use this to think carefully before setting this to run too frequently.

RouterStats available from http://www.vwlowen.co.uk/internet/files.htm  This will show the signal to noise ratio and bitloadings - very helpful in checking the network on your side of the router.  Not all routers are supported but many are and as long as you know your router credentials it's not hard to set up.

Broadband Quality Monitor is available at http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping and is excellent for gamers interested in latency, or folks wanting to know if they have a stable connection

These programs do need some configuration - they are not simple plug and play apps, but this shouldn't be much of a problem for those interested enough to download them in the first place.