DSL secrets your ISP doesn’t want you to know
If you live in Ontario or Quebec then you probably have to deal with the likes of Bell Canada. I’ve been using Primus but really it’s just Bell infrastructure for the last hop to my house. As you no doubt know, where you live can affect DSL connection speeds.
This week I finally caved in and bought a new DSL modem with said advertised speeds of up to 24Mbps downstream and 3.5Mbps upstream. It’s actually a bit of a trick to even find these on the Canadian market since usually you have to rent the modem given to you by Bell as part of the service.
To my surprise my new modem (D-Link DSL 2320B) boosted my connection speed to just over 2200 kbps which is a huge improvement over my old modem (GNet ADSL BB0050) that averaged only 1200 kbps. I’d have never thought that just changing the modem would make such a huge improvement. Keep in mind, this is still a pretty slow connection when you compare it to the North American average. For instance, Mitch gets 4300 kbps at his place. If you’re looking for a good speed test site check out SpeedTest.net The neat thing about this flash driven speed test is that it will let you test your connection speed around the world.
w00t! I’m on Rogers, with their extreme option. I got 7932 down, and 799 up. I’m no great Rogers fan, but they are lookin pretty good now. A few years ago I had a Bell DSL modem – and the speed at my house in Britannia was 50k – just *slightly* better than modem speeds.
8000 sounds pretty sweet. I managed just over 5000 with Bell accessing a server in Bermuda. Only thing about Rogers is their distasteful practice of traffic shaping. Their extreme speed won’t be much good if you’re on BitTorrent or if your name is Michael Geist!
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/203408
Maybe you should investigate Spectral Shaping:
http://www.support.dlink.com/emulators/dsl2320b/adslcfgtone.htm
Reduce the Up-Stream rate to improve the Down-Stream side.