Gee I just tested at Speedtest and my best was 24.9 megs down and 3.1 up. That's real close to the max given by Charter Cable though. We have the lowest priced plan available which 5 years ago was only giving 384mb (that's megabytes and 48kb/s) down. They have increased speeds about 5 times now without changing the pricing. The first hike was to 1.5 megs down, then 3, then 5, then 15, and now 25 max.
My best ping was 45 but the best speed was from Towerstream in New York City which is 300 miles away. When I play World of Warcraft, my latency hovers just over 100ms but the server I connect to is in California so that's not bad.
Oh yeah, web shield on or off makes no difference whatsoever.