by Moe Zilla

Created on: August 28, 2010

There's some easy ways to speed up your internet connection - but first you have to understand what's affecting your speed. It's not just determined by the speed of your broadband connection, since many other factors can also come between you and your data. Having said that, the amount of data you can download obviously is affected by the "size of the pipe". So if you're looking for the fastest possible connection, start with the fastest form of  broadband that's available in your neighborhood. 

In general, a cable connection (like Comcast) will perform faster than a DSL connection like SBC/Yahoo. But your DSL speed will improve greatly if you're lucky enough to live close to your provider's equipment! And that connection is "shared" among your neighbors, so speed drops if there's too much traffic coming from other users. A cable connection usually starts out at a higher speed - and it's definitely going to be faster than a heavily congested DSL connection.

In some areas, your only choice may be a local dial-up connection. In that case, you're facing a new bottleneck: the speed of your dial-up modem. Fortunately, some dial-up providers take their own steps to increase your internet speed. They can reduce the quality of the graphics you're downloading, so they'll take less time for you to download them. It most cases this is an optional service, but it can help to increase your internet speed.

There's also some dramatic horror stories about malicious people who "steal your bandwidth." A clever hacker can tap into your connection, and divert some of its resources towards their own computer. In most cases, this can go unnoticed - except for a pesky drop in the quality of your own internet connection. Sometimes a good technician can diagnose the problem, and then trace the diverted bandwidth all the way to its culprit!

Sometimes the best way to improve you speed is by fine-tuning your own system! For example, a technician from my internet service provider once pointed out that I just didn't have enough RAM on my system. My broadband connection was downloading videos faster than my system could handle, so eventually the memory would fill up, and then freeze, resulting in a frustrating "stutter" in the picture! I'd assumed that the speed of my connection was fluctuating, but the real problem was on my end. Instead, it was the performance of my computer's RAM memory that was erratic!

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