I enjoyed Roger Crombie's column last week in this newspaper on banning drivers from using their cells phones while on the road. He noted that research shows that use of such devices while driving increases by a multiple of 23 the likelihood of an accident.

Crombie will get a kick out of new research which shows the reverse is also true. A study released last week by a group of 'psycholinguists' at the University of Illinois found that driving hinders talking.

"Driving reduces one's ability to comprehend and use language," the researchers say.

In fact, driving while listening can reduce one's ability to understand what is being said by up to 20 percent according to the tests they conducted.

"You might think that talking is an easy thing to do and that comprehending language is easy," says Gary Dell, a psycholinguist in the department of psychology at the university. "But it's not. Speech production and speech comprehension are attention-demanding activities, and so they ought to compete with other tasks that require your attention - like driving."

The testing was done in a driving simulator. Participants either sat in an unmoving vehicle or navigated through busy urban traffic while listening to, and then retelling, a brief story that they had never heard before. Using a headphone and a microphone, each participant heard and retold four stories. After leaving the simulator, all participants were asked to recall everything that they remembered about the stories.

"The relative balance of attention to any two tasks is going to vary," Dell said. "And perhaps we don't understand one another as well as we should because of this. With modern technology, we're talking more and more while we are doing other things, but we may be understanding one another less and less."

I think this latter comment should be noted by everyone, and especially by companies who allow their employees to conduct business while driving: Warning, you may blow the deal! The diminished comprehension adds an incentive for executives to heed Crombie's call for businesses to take the initiative to help protect their employees, and themselves, from the potential dangers of distracted driving.

It goes back to the old expression about a person's ability to "walk and chew gum at the same time".

Multi-tasking is not for everyone, and for everyone it may be detrimental to understanding each other a little better - or driving safely.

Unlike Crombie, I finally gave in to the pressure two years ago and bought a cell phone. But I do not use it while driving, just as I do not drink and drive. I also gave up on listening to audio books while driving. I once got so involved in listening to a detective novel that I grazed my car on the side of a wall. However, I do chew gum and drive.

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The debate over Internet connect speeds continues to spark responses from upset and confused customers of Bermuda's Internet connection providers.

At a risk of beating the subject into boredom, I would like to mention the comment that came in from Jamie Thain, a former diving buddy of mine and a director of FKB Transact, one of Bermuda's Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Among other points, he addresses the concerns people had that their upload speeds are well below their download speeds.

"I think it is fair to do testing and we should strive to have the best networks possible. DSL is generally not symmetrical so one would expect a slower upload speed," he wrote. For ADSL the 'A' stands for 'asymetrical' and the upload rate is usually about one-quarter to one-half of the download rate. This showed in the tests people sent in and is to be expected.

He also notes that Internet users should upgrade their modems over time. "We see this one a lot, where people are upgrading to a 4Mb service and have a relatively old modem," he writes. "Upgrading the firmware and/or the modem often gets the fastest speed possible."

He adds: "For the gentleman who was getting less than 1Mb/s down, I would strong suggest a modem upgrade," he writes. "Check all the wires and make sure what he has as a connection with his ISP."

In response to a comment in the last column by another IT executive in Bermuda that the island's ISPs "cannot and do not guarantee the Internet speed once it leaves the ISP's equipment", Thain accepts the statement and adds: "However, that said, the speed to any of the three ISPs test servers should be fairly consistent. Ours is open to the world as part of being a speedtest.net server. The ISPs all have interconnections to each other. That means all of our traffic stays on-island instead of routing to the US and back. Therefore anyone that was testing to our SpeedTest.Net server and had a ping time higher than 60ms probably has something else wrong with either their machine or line."

Users with a PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) account with either Logic or North Rock should have a typical ping time of 40ms plus or minus 10 to 15ms, he wrote.

Test data can also be slightly worse than is actually achieved as testing server traffic - and ping in particular - is a lower priority on most ISPs networks than for real data. When Thain tests he does so by downloading a large file and looking at his connection information to see how many MB/sec he is getting.

"I hope this helps, and keep testing," he concludes.

What these comments emphasise is testing should be done regularly to ensure you are squeezing all the speed out of your connection. With testing you can first determine if you have a problem.

Once you determine you are spending a lot more time waiting than you should, then you can assess what is causing the problem.

It is probably best to begin at home. You need to check your modem, other hardware and software for the correct configuration. Then start looking at the wiring and then the connection to your home from your telecommunications provider.

Then it comes down to a shell game as to whether the fault likes with the telecommunications provider or your ISP or both.

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com