As president of the Sunshine Coast Computer Club for more than a decade, Peter Daley has answered more computing questions than he would care to remember. He also helps run a technology help line service called www.technologypals.com.au giving people help over the phone.
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Double your broadband speed for free
| Peter Daley
Why dawdle along in the slow lane, when you can cruise along at speed in the fast lane for free?
My sister asked if there was any way to speed up her slow broadband connection. She was so pleased at the result, she told all the relatives.
So rather than tell the whole world one at a time, here's how I did it.
You can potentially double the speed of your ADSL broadband connection, at no extra cost, and with very little technical skill. This is not magic; it is just improving the efficiency of your current ADSL broadband connection.
Firstly, the XP and Vista operating systems’ default settings are still stuck in the dark ages of dial-up internet connections. It's like driving a Model T Ford down a modern high-speed highway.
Your computer can be easily fine-tuned by using free software tools available on the internet. It is like removing the stop lights and roundabouts, and turning your internet road into a faster highway.
These tricks can also be applied to those of you using Linux and Apple Mac computers, although the speed increases probably won't be as dramatic, because Linux and Apple Mac systems are already tuned better for broadband connections.
Mozilla Firefox
Everyone can get up to a 40% increase in speed and internet security, whether they are using Windows, Linux or an Apple computer, by downloading and installing an alternative web browser called Mozilla Firefox from here: http://www.mozilla.com.
Note:
Linux users will already have Mozilla Firefox installed.
Once Mozilla Firefox is downloaded and installed on your computer, and you are connected to the internet, click on the menu item “Tools”, and in the pop down box, click “Add Ons”.
When an “Add-On” box appears, click on the “Get Extension” link at the bottom right-hand corner of this box. This will take you the extensions website, where you can find and install Firefox extensions.
In the search box at the top right of this page, type in Fasterfox and click the “Search” button, then navigate to the page where the green “Install Now” button appears. Click the install button and the Fasterfox extension will be installed.
Once it is installed, you will need to shut down and reopen the Firefox browser. After you do this, your web browsing experience will be up to 40% faster and a lot safer than using Internet Explorer.
TCP Optimizer & Unblocka
These tools will work for most versions of Windows except Vista. Using either TCP Optimizer or Unblocka, can potentially double your Windows Broadband speed!
TCP Optimizer can be downloaded from here:
www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
The Unblocka tool from here:
(Note: There are two downloads at the Unblocka site – one download is the instructions, and the other is the Unblocka utility.)
To get the best performance for both the TCP Optimizer and Unblocka programs, you will need to know the ISP download and maybe the upload speeds of your broadband connection. You can get this information from your ISP, or the info sheet they sent you when you signed up.
If you choose to use TCP Optimizer, move the speed selection slider in the opening window to your broadband download speed value. Then click on the "Optimal Settings" button and the "Apply Changes" button at the bottom right hand corner or this window.
This is all the average user needs to do in TCP Optimizer. If you have more computer skills, you can explore some of the advanced settings. There is tons of more information at www.speedguide.net/ on speeding up your broadband.
Restart your computer.
Using Unblocka:
Select the values in the selections boxes for your download and upload values in the Unblocka window, and then click the “Tune” button.
Restart your computer.
Open DNS
The third item is a bit more technical. Go to the Open DNS website – http://www.opendns.com – and read the info.
Navigate to the network connection settings in your operating system. There are screen shots at this site on how to do this.
In the DNS settings, substitute these Open DNS numbers. (Note: You don't need to sign up to use the Open DNS system, plus all these settings are reversible if you don't like the result).
Primary DNS; 208.67.222.222
Secondary DNS; 208.67.220.220
This will also give every operating system broadband connection a speed boost.
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Recent Comments
Ann
I recommend Firefox too but not because it's faster. That's a myth. If you want faster, try Opera or Konquerer or even Safari (this works on both Windows and Mac) Opera also has the best security record of any browser. Have a look on Secunia for verification.
You say that these tricks can be applied to Linux and Mac computers and yet you then give us a program that only works on Windows. Maybe if you told us what the program actually does then we would be able to replicate its effect on Linux and Mac.
There are many good reasons to use OpenDNS but I've never heard speed mentioned as one of them... unless your ISP's DNS servers are horribly slow or on the other side of the world from you. Most often, your ISP's DNS servers will be much closer to you than any of OpenDNS's servers and hence the lookups will be much faster when using your ISP's DNS. If you want to make DNS faster, the best trick I ever did was installing a local caching DNS server on my computer. This took each lookup after the first from 300ms down to 4ms or 5ms.
Lastly, you can't actually increase your broadband speed if you are getting anywhere near the theoretical maximum. If you pay for 8Mb and you can download files and nearly 1MB/s then tuning your connection won't help. The local caching DNS server will help (but only a third of a second here and there).
Some web-accelerators can help by doing something tricky. They actually download the page for you on their servers, compress it and send you the compressed version. This can make your bandwidth up to 10x more efficient and feel significantly faster. Web accelerators like this are not free and have their own range of problems.
There are also some tricks that don't make your broadband any faster but can improve the experience of browsing. Both Firefox and Safari have tunable parameters for controlling how fast the page is displayed after it has been downloaded. I don't remember the specifics now but I'm sure Google can find a tutorial for you. I also recommend AdBlockPlus as a great way to avoid both the annoyance of ads and the bandwidth wasted by downloading them. It's amazing how often I see a 50KB page with 2KB of content that embeds a 1MB ad.
The Firefox speed increase is not obtained from the Firefox browser, but by installing the Fasterfox add on, which fine tunes Firefox to go faster. If you read the whole section in this blog, it explains how to install the Fasterfox addon.
I agree with you that the DNS change may not give any speed benefits. This will depend on the efficiency of your present ISP's DNS servers. A lot of ISP DNS servers are overloaded, or not set up very well, hence the comment in the DNS section of the blog "All these settings are reversible, if you don't like the result". If your ISP DNS is not very well set up, then Open DNS can make a big difference.