k1ng

I'm home(with my folks) for the summer. When I'm home, I connect my parents computer and my computer to a router to access the internet (and share a printer).

When I first got here, I was happy with the speed (it appears our bandwith cap had been doubled to 400KB/s). But as of the last couple days, my connection has been crawling--pages take forever to load, downloads seems a lil slow, and even downloading/sending e-mail seems to take forever. I unplugged my connection from the router and plugged it straight into the cable modem. Things seemed to be a little faster *now* when i don't use the router... even though a week ago things were great. It doesn't make sense to me.

Before I look into this problem any further, I want to make sure its something worth looking into. Is it possible my router is slowing me down? If it is, what should I do?

It's possible its just the service that's kind of sluggish and if that is the case, I will contact Comcast tomorrow.

Just wanted to get a couple opinions before I chose to pursue any of these options. Thanks!

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Cynthetiq

this may also be related to your bittorrent question

some ISPs have bandwidth throttlers because the only people who are constantly d/l or u/l are those who are using something like bit torrent, kazaa, etc.

My ISP put an instant cap on my d/l speeds after 10 hours of contstant bandwidth usage. I ended up arguing with them over the definition of "fair use" and to show me in the Terms of Service where it said that I couldn't download large files from my office or clients? They had to eventually reset my modem and uncap the cap that was put onto it.

and remember before you go in there guns blazing... hosting a server is against your TOS.

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k1ng

It's very possible that this problem is related to my bittorrent question. I'm thinking that setting the bittorrent to unlimited upload was hurting my bandwidth. After I limited my upload speeds, I noticed some faster page loads... hopefully this just isn't a coincidence. Thanks for your help.

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Lasereth

So you're using Bit Torrent on a routed network? Damn man, no wonder it's going slow! My family shares a DSL connection on four computers, all on a Linksys routed network. If my brother connects to Bit Torrent, it slows down everyone's computers to a crawl (concerning the Internet). Downloads go alright, but webpages take FOREVER to load!

The reason? Bit Torrent uses every last ounce of uploading bandwidth allowed for broadband. When people download the Torrents from you, you're using upload bandwidth to send it to them. This results in the bandwidth being hogged by Bit Torrent. Webpages are loading by downloading, but the initial request for a webpage is sent through uploading. If the upload bandwidth is taken by Bit Torrent, then the requests for webpages will be slow as hell due to the upload bandwidth being limited!

I suggest you close out Bit Torrent and see if that helps. My webpages load at sub-56k speeds when Bit Torrent is ran on our network.

-Lasereth

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