A lot of people are asking how to get a +550K download speed from their broadband service. A great deal has been said about RWIN size, Proxy Servers etc. At the risk of drawing fire I'd like to point something out that seems to be overlooked......

You can only get the top speed from your cable modem that your local area supports. What this means is that the more people you have using cable in your neighborhood - the slower your average download speed is going to be. You can change your RWIN from here to eternity, but it won't make much difference.

My cable connection lets me get typical peak-time average speeds of 500k+ . Off-peak (early morning) goes upwards of 700k There's not many people in my neighborhood using cable and the main population here in Parksville is old people. They check their e-mail - that's about it. For all intents & purposes it's my network Also, Shaw's fibre for this end of the Island goes right through town.

Because the available bandwidth to me is at least 500K average - tweaking shows a big increase. This does depend on the operating system I'm using. With Windows 98 box stock, I will only see an average of 300K download when I should have 500+. By tweaking it will climb to 500K+ This is because Windows 98's TCP/IP stack was not designed to take into account higher-speed access that you get with a broadband connection. Now think about this for a moment...

If your neighborhood has lots of people using cable modems, it might only give you 300K maximum due to the other users. As such, Windows 98 would not require any tweaks and if you did you would not see a difference. Ditto for other operating systems.

The most important things I've found in Cable Modem speed are;

[1] How much contention is their in your local network? Are you living in downtown Vancouver or Parksville? (pop. 10K)

[2] Using the proxy server. It almost always results in a doubling of my speed depending on where I surf. This is because the requests are serviced locally (internally on Shaw's network) - providing someone's been there before you. Regardless of where you live - this should increase your speed.

[3] What Operating System am I using? Windows XP seems to self-adjust itself to the optimum. Windows 2000 is close right out of the box. Windows 98 & 95 & ME are in serious need of modification IF the available bandwidth is there to take advantage of it.

In closing, on my systems tweaking shows anywhere from a 300k increase (Windows 98) to roughly a 150K increase (Windows 2000) because I have the available bandwidth to make use of those tweaks.

Please address all Questions to the Forum