haha nice

We just replaced our wireless router, it is hard to know if it was failing or if our DSL just sucks. How can you tell?

I do this for a living. try this

Start> Run> type cmd in the box

When the prompt comes up type "ping www.google.com"

Look at the number where it says "time= XX ms" and tell me what it says.

Do you use any major filesharing networks, roundtower? Bittorrent, Usenet, anything like that? Does anyone in your home use them?

What brand/model number is your router?

Have you updated the router firmware?

Who is your internet provider?

A lot of times a firmware update will solve a vast majority of router issues.

Same advice I give to roundtower.

Update the firmware and see if it works any better.

all DSL sucks, it's a ridiculous technology

Thanks. Yeah it seems great, and the company is 1.5x to 2x-ing in the next couple years, so hoping to get in while the gettin's good!

Thx. Definitely. Don't let me forget. POG NYC (or Philly) get together?

I live much closer to Philly, one of the suburbs northeast of there - Langhorne, which is mostly known for Sesame Place being here.

38ms ping to www.google.com

both I and my housemate use bittorrent, this is one of the main things that seems to cause problems with the internet connection (even when it isn't running at a high bitrate)

the router is a Zyxel P-660HW-T1 v3. it is new, or maybe refurbished I guess, and came from the ISP in replacement of the old one which I believe was the same model.

It doesn't want to let me update the firmware, I am getting an error "The uploaded file was not accepted by the device." The current firmware is 3 months old and has the same version number as the latest firmware which is 2 days old.

Internet provider is eircom.

I'm not certain we have a problem at the moment, it may already have been solved by replacing the router. The internet is working fine at the moment (but it always worked fine intermittently).

thanks systolic!

as far as I can tell from some quick googling, the current firmware is a custom firmware made for the ISP, it is numbered V3.70(BOE.3)D0 while their standard release versions end in C0. that might be why it won't accept the new firmware?

38ms is forever

If you ever have problems with slow down on your interent connection while you are using torrents, turn your upload WAY down/off. Of course, lots of torrent users don't like this because you are kind of killing the spirit of torrents, but I have found a TON of ISP will throttle a user's overall bandwidth if they are SEEDING (not leeching) on torrents.

Probably. Proprietary anything = bull****.

Its not terrible. 80+ is bad for a broadband connection, but considering that Round has DSL, and is probably on something around a 3-6MB connection, 38ms is actually quite decent.

Turning off the distributed database when torrenting can help, too, and it won't have a direct effect on upload or downloading speed. But do be sure to set your upload speed correctly — about 80% of max is fine.

dude, I have **** to do and can't wait around while it takes milliseconds for google to respond.

it's about 28ms from here to Google headquarters at lightspeed if there was a cable along the direct great-circle route

so how does it do a round trip in 38ms?

Google might have more than 1 data centre

it's disappointing when you think something is magic, but it turns out it's all done with mirrors.

so how does a mirror know to flip you backwards left-to-right but not up-and-down?

Best bet is to get any router that can just run Linux or preferably any BSD. Most Linksys' can run Linux iirc, there's a bunch of other ones that can without much tinkering

Soekris boxes run around 300$ iirc, if you don't mind spending money I think that's the best investment (with OpenBSD). You can do loads of fancy things that waaay more expensive Cisco routers do

$300? Lots of fancy things? I want my router to do one thing, competently.

it can be monstrous to get some of those Linksys home-type routers to do even simple stuff like pass PPTP traffic (inbound, that is, outbound is ez)