Whom Should I Blame For Low Internet Speed?

[vhortex 1]

as a backup reply to the modem part..modems only affect speed if they are broken (or specifically they are set at lower speed) and even the best modem can't speed up the maximum line speed you got. this is the same reason why my non gigabit ethernet connection laptop can't fully use the 2gigabit line speed we have at work. my laptop can only connect wireless or cabled up to 100megabits to the router and the router which i have connection only have the speed of 100megabits. It may also be a factor if you have an Ethernet card (network card) that have low max speed specially if the card's max speed is way smaller than your actual ISP speed. ************ISP's limit your bandwidth and they send you to a series of network traffic switchers. if you are using way too much bandwidth than the contract you have, they will impose penalties on it. My ISP only put bandwidth limits on international connections since it was where the bulk of our pay goes using the international interchange. local connections within my country does not pass this limiting factor. bandwidth is always cut between how many people are using the service as stated by 8ennett. my home connection is a wireless one, i prefer this setting since i can swap to 4 base stations at will and can maintain 2 active connections at the same time which is being handled by my wireless router antenna. it gives me freedom to swap connections if one base station is nearing full usage avoiding slow connection. this however penalize me with some disconnections on systems that are not MAC address aware since i also register a new IP address on this swap. i was thankful that 95% of sites that i visits knows how to handle sudden IP changes.

[H.O.D 0]

Hi!
I think the night unlimited plans are quite inexpensive and you can use them to run Windows updates and updates for any other software that you use during the off-peak hours. If you have to make a large download, you can download it at night. I'm not sure if you get the 2Mbps speed during the night unlimited period too - I'm guessing they might reduce the speed to 512kbps, as in the unlimited plan.

Some Internet connectivity plans offer you a higher speed till you reach a certain bandwidth, which is when they would drop you down to a lower speed for the rest of the month. It's unlimited, but you only get half the speed if you are using it for extensive downloading.

I tried to use an "unlimited" plan for a month as I mentioned on July 1 and the speed promised was 256kbps which translates to a download speed of around 20-30kilobytes per second. The promised speed was indeed delivered and since this was encouraging, in this month (August) I moved on to a higher speed plan (512kbps) and am getting download speeds of 60-90kilobytes which seems to be good value for the money I'm paying. In other countries I don't know how the plans are - unlimited plans come with speeds in Mbps? That's a far away dream right now but at the moment things are looking just sort of okay. Browsing speed has been very good and youtube videos play with minimum buffering which is something phenomenal for this plan!

I haven't read through all the replies in this thread but one of the interesting claims was that the modem could affect the internet speed. I have used a very old modem since my very first broadband connection;for almost five years and it fell down very roughly on the floor many times and got a few loose parts. Even then it managed to function fine and when I had the 2mbps connection, in its peak time the modem was able to deliver 220+ kbps download speed which was very impressive. After switching to the new connection I decided to upgrade the modem as well, and the new modem functions as a router as well, and there's hardly any change in performance. So I think there's no real impact of the modem on speed unless one really wants it to reduce the speed. There is a trick available for bumping up the speed by a few kilobytes but it doesn't involve the modem at all.

Anyway thanks for all the responses to this thread. Over the past two months I got to know a few aspects of how speed varies over the internet and what factors affect it . For now I'm very happy with my new unlimited connection as it offers a respectable and decent download speed and I can download at any time of the day instead of staying up late at midnight to download something. Now am just looking forward to the day when my ISP will introduce unlimited plans in mbps. It already exists in the form of data cards, but would be nice to see it for my wired connection as well.