Speed Up DSL and Cable Internet Connections
Often I have sat at someone’s computer in a small office or home and found the internet service lacking. Basically, people set up their computers and local network in a way that makes their service much slower than it can be; this happens most often when you set it up just the way the ISP instructed.
The quickest and cheapest way to drastically speed up your internet responses is to tweak your computers’ network settings and to insert a hardware router. Everyone I’ve convince to do this are amazed at how much faster everything seems to work. Explaining why this is the case is more complex and time consuming than just telling you how to solve the problem. We’ll leave the nerdy tech speak for another article.
Software and configurations are most often guilty of slowing down home and SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) internet connections. To put it simply, you should never use proprietary software (those CDs they send with the DSL/Cable modem) to manage the connection, you should never use the DSL/Cable modem to proxy DNS (Domain Name Services), and you should seldom use the default settings for anything related to connectivity or name services (DNS) even if the system doesn’t act as a proxy.
When setting up my local internet connection, my DSL modem claims the default proxy for DNS (if allowed).It’s a DHCP setting and fairly common. That means that every time I need a website with a name, like jasonn.com, it waits for the modem to ask its upstream nameservers and then relays that to my personal computer. This created a painful lag in surfing. In Windows, this is easy to get around. You just go to your connection manager – – right click on and click on the “Lan or High Speed Internet Connection” icon; then click on “Properties”, select “TCP/IP”, click on properties after hilighting “TCP/IP”, look at the “General” tab, and glance down to see the selection option for “Use the following DNS server addresses”. You can find DNS servers that are fast in forums (usually outside the website for your local ISP). Don’t worry necessarily about joining any forums, just go online and search for postings through your favorite search engine. Enter those numbers you find that people report are fastest. They are going to look something like “123.123.12.1″, though that’s not a real DNS server as far as I know. In some cases, friendly ISPs will have fast caching DNS servers they will happily share with you should you ask. Sometimes, they don’t have tech support staff that would know the difference between a fast or slow DNS server.
For example, on my home DSL access, I looked around online (did a Google search to find discussions) and found a server people said was fast – and they were right. I set it in that config section on my Windows box, and it sped up my web browsing by around ten times faster. Yes, it makes that big a differnce in many cases!
Now that you’ve sped your DNS response, which is often guilty for very sluggist web browsing, it’s time to look at how you connect to the internet. Software controlled data connections are bad. Simply put, Windows – almost always the software of choice on which to install such behemoth management tools – gets overloaded with tasks when you surf the web already. Adding the simple but somehow bloated task of managing the connection, or worse, sharing the connection or proxy for other computers is just too much. It will cause your browsing experience to degrade to the point that often responses won’t be much faster than dialup. A hardware router is cheap, easy to install, and always speeds everything up.
Often ISPs don’t support hardware routers. Even if they offer some concoction modem/router directly, sometimes they want you to use their software to manage your connection. Perhaps it’s because they have governors on the bandwidth in their software. Perhaps it’s because they think it’s easier for the average home user. My guess is that it’s just their obsession with micromanaging your every move behind your modem. These services almost never support operating systems that can actually handle NAT (Network Address Translation) or proxy services. They always want you to use whatever home installation of Windows you happen to be running, which only increases the chance that a virus on one computer will knock you offline until resolved. Bypass it with cheap and effective hardware. Get the basics and forget about getting much help from your ISP – it’s not needed or helpful most of the time.
You need to know two things: how you connect to their system and what user/password you may need to access their modem or network connection. In many cases, you can even spend a few extra bucks and toss their equipment if you think it is sub par.
Most cable modems are braindead simple. They connect via mac address, or the physical address. It’s an imprinted network identification that tells the network it is specifically your device. There’s no need in these cases for a username or password unless they’ve specifically required that on the connection. Then, you simply need a DSL/Cable router, which you can pick up online or at many local office supply stores.
If you are connecting through DSL, it will most often require that you connect via PPPOE or PPPOA. What’s the difference? Again, the geeky article will be printed later for your amusement. Today, let’s keep it simple. One setting or the other, they are both simple. You are sending a username and a password just like a dialup connection in order to connect. Most often, theses ISPs cycle their equipment (knock you offline) periodically to keep you from having a hard IP number. Why would they do that? Again, now’s not the time for the geeky conversation. Let’s just say it keeps you from doing things they don’t want you to do, like host a web server… at least they think that anyway. And, that also is another discussion. Your DSL/Cable Router will have a will have a few options, check the ones you know to be correct, add the username or password if your connection requires it, and most often you’ll immediately have a system that connects you automatically and you can just let your computers connect and use the internet with no more hassles.
The quickest and cheapest way to drastically speed up your internet responses is to tweak your computers’ network settings and to insert a hardware router. Everyone I’ve convince to do this are amazed at how much faster everything seems to work. Explaining why this is the case is more complex and time consuming than just telling you how to solve the problem. We’ll leave the nerdy tech speak for another article.
Software and configurations are most often guilty of slowing down home and SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) internet connections. To put it simply, you should never use proprietary software (those CDs they send with the DSL/Cable modem) to manage the connection, you should never use the DSL/Cable modem to proxy DNS (Domain Name Services), and you should seldom use the default settings for anything related to connectivity or name services (DNS) even if the system doesn’t act as a proxy.
When setting up my local internet connection, my DSL modem claims the default proxy for DNS (if allowed).It’s a DHCP setting and fairly common. That means that every time I need a website with a name, like jasonn.com, it waits for the modem to ask its upstream nameservers and then relays that to my personal computer. This created a painful lag in surfing. In Windows, this is easy to get around. You just go to your connection manager – – right click on and click on the “Lan or High Speed Internet Connection” icon; then click on “Properties”, select “TCP/IP”, click on properties after hilighting “TCP/IP”, look at the “General” tab, and glance down to see the selection option for “Use the following DNS server addresses”. You can find DNS servers that are fast in forums (usually outside the website for your local ISP). Don’t worry necessarily about joining any forums, just go online and search for postings through your favorite search engine. Enter those numbers you find that people report are fastest. They are going to look something like “123.123.12.1″, though that’s not a real DNS server as far as I know. In some cases, friendly ISPs will have fast caching DNS servers they will happily share with you should you ask. Sometimes, they don’t have tech support staff that would know the difference between a fast or slow DNS server.
For example, on my home DSL access, I looked around online (did a Google search to find discussions) and found a server people said was fast – and they were right. I set it in that config section on my Windows box, and it sped up my web browsing by around ten times faster. Yes, it makes that big a differnce in many cases!
Now that you’ve sped your DNS response, which is often guilty for very sluggist web browsing, it’s time to look at how you connect to the internet. Software controlled data connections are bad. Simply put, Windows – almost always the software of choice on which to install such behemoth management tools – gets overloaded with tasks when you surf the web already. Adding the simple but somehow bloated task of managing the connection, or worse, sharing the connection or proxy for other computers is just too much. It will cause your browsing experience to degrade to the point that often responses won’t be much faster than dialup. A hardware router is cheap, easy to install, and always speeds everything up.
Often ISPs don’t support hardware routers. Even if they offer some concoction modem/router directly, sometimes they want you to use their software to manage your connection. Perhaps it’s because they have governors on the bandwidth in their software. Perhaps it’s because they think it’s easier for the average home user. My guess is that it’s just their obsession with micromanaging your every move behind your modem. These services almost never support operating systems that can actually handle NAT (Network Address Translation) or proxy services. They always want you to use whatever home installation of Windows you happen to be running, which only increases the chance that a virus on one computer will knock you offline until resolved. Bypass it with cheap and effective hardware. Get the basics and forget about getting much help from your ISP – it’s not needed or helpful most of the time.
You need to know two things: how you connect to their system and what user/password you may need to access their modem or network connection. In many cases, you can even spend a few extra bucks and toss their equipment if you think it is sub par.
Most cable modems are braindead simple. They connect via mac address, or the physical address. It’s an imprinted network identification that tells the network it is specifically your device. There’s no need in these cases for a username or password unless they’ve specifically required that on the connection. Then, you simply need a DSL/Cable router, which you can pick up online or at many local office supply stores.
If you are connecting through DSL, it will most often require that you connect via PPPOE or PPPOA. What’s the difference? Again, the geeky article will be printed later for your amusement. Today, let’s keep it simple. One setting or the other, they are both simple. You are sending a username and a password just like a dialup connection in order to connect. Most often, theses ISPs cycle their equipment (knock you offline) periodically to keep you from having a hard IP number. Why would they do that? Again, now’s not the time for the geeky conversation. Let’s just say it keeps you from doing things they don’t want you to do, like host a web server… at least they think that anyway. And, that also is another discussion. Your DSL/Cable Router will have a will have a few options, check the ones you know to be correct, add the username or password if your connection requires it, and most often you’ll immediately have a system that connects you automatically and you can just let your computers connect and use the internet with no more hassles.
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