Saab...thanks for your response. According to the connection data, (bytes transmitted, bytes received) there does seem to be some external activity beyond the modem, or am I reading this wrongly?
Are other suggestions you can give in addition to your other recommendations?
From my experience so far, using Tiscali's help pages, I have pinged 127.0.0.1 successfully. That address I assume is the modem, but using IP addresses from the browser itself has resulted in a long delay while the progress meter shows very slow progress - but my patience usually wears out before pages are actually received!
Thanks for all your help.