Is there any brand/type of NIC that will speed up my slow DSL?

[Junior0579]

I have had a cable modem and two different DSL providers and they are all slow. I have an Athlon 1.2, 512 ddr, and realtek 10/100. My current dsl connections is supposed to be 1.5/348, but I get dl speeds of no more than 50-100kps. All of my friends are getting max dl speeds of 500+kbs. Could a new NIC make a difference?

 

[TopGun]

No. Download speeds depend alot on the site you're downloading from. Also, 1.5mbps DSL line has a max download speed of 192K/sec. So 50-100 is really not too bad... Try picking a fast site, try downloading a file from a microsoft site or something, and see what happens.

 

[JackMDS]

Average good Cable Internet is 2-3 Mb/sec. DSL usually less. 10Mb/sec NIC is good enough to pass such bandwidth, the NIC is not the component that limits Internet bandwidth. Unless something is wrong with your specific NIC.

You can try to check the parameters of your connection setting.

Download DrTCP from DSLreports, and use it to adjust your settings.

Link: DSLreports.com - DrTCP

The following is an Example of setting optimized for Cable Internet system.

Tcp Receive - 513920

Window Scaling - Yes

Time Stamping ? No

Selective Acks ? Yes

Path MTU Discovery - Yes.

Black Hole ? NO

Max Duplicate ? 3

TTL ? 64

MaxMTU ? 1500.


Your mileage may vary.

 

[Junior0579]

I thought that 1.5Mbps was supposed to be just that, 1.5Mbps max dl. That's what Sprint told me. Is that not the case?

 

[AmigaMan]

depends on whether you're talking bits or bytes.

 

[JackMDS]

If your system is tweaked correctly.

Download a big file (about 5MB) from a countable site.

The Browser's Download Window should show about 125KB/sec.

Since 1-Byte is 8-bits

1.5Mb/sec. (b=bit) is 187.5 KB/sec. (B=Byte).

There are natural loses, and system overhead, you will get only 60% to 80% of the Theoretical Speed.

To get 500KB/sec. you need a service with a bandwidth over 5Mb/sec.