Thanks all for this useful thread .... right now I have a vexing problem which may be related (or p'raps not?).
Background:- mostly, I'm running Dpup Stretch 32 with Palemoon on a now-elderly (Pentium D) box, and living in rural UK I have been using exclusively a 3G cellular data link for years with much satisfaction ... until a few weeks ago, when suddenly a very frequent, intermittent, infuriating difficulty emerged - it was taking so long to connect to websites for much of the time that I was getting timeout messages, but otherwise I still had instant connection.
My first point is that "speed", as such, may be a red herring if the underlying cause of difficulty - whatever the means of transmission, be it ethernet / cable / cellular - is a packet-routing failure on the part of the ISP network (that's my own prime suspect right now).
After doing substitution checks for my modem / cable / OS / browser without result, I have today run a "speed" test download for a 275 MB Puppy - fortuititously, instant connection, then timed at 5 min -> 7.6 Mbits/sec. (assuming 8:1 conversion). That's puny by today's standards, but much more than adequate for my own very modest needs (I don't do any online gaming, video downloads, crypto mining etc.).
I have long ago fixed Pupdial to report signal strength from my local base station every time I connect, and it remains quite adequate. Blinky keeps hinting that that my cellular base station is intermittently ignoring my requests for website connection, hence my thoughts that my problem might just be local.
In the the UK there has been a movement to mast-sharing in which the base is installed and maintained by contractors rather than the ISPs themselves, and unfortunately in my case the contractors seem to have been poorly supervised and lacking in both respects. Sites like 'whatsdown' indicate that the problem is not a regional or national one, and I therefore surmise that it may just be a bad circuit board at my local base station which keeps dropping packet routing requests.
I have not yet had chance to do a substitution check on my computer, which seems to be performing normally, so the reference to 'hardware' in this thread title has me wondering. Can anyone offer better insight on this very annoying problem, perhaps from similar experience?