To find out how fast your internet connection is, do a google search for “bandwidth speed test” – there’s a site called bandwidthplace that will do a free speed test on your connection. You can also just ping a site to see how fast you connect. From a command prompt, type “ping www.yahoo.com”. I get this:
C:\Documents and Settings\Kevin>ping www.yahoo.com
Pinging www.yahoo.akadns.net [66.94.230.37] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 66.94.230.37: bytes=32 time=68ms TTL=51
Reply from 66.94.230.37: bytes=32 time=68ms TTL=51
Reply from 66.94.230.37: bytes=32 time=66ms TTL=51
Reply from 66.94.230.37: bytes=32 time=67ms TTL=51
Ping statistics for 66.94.230.37:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 66ms, Maximum = 68ms, Average = 67ms
This tells me it takes an average of 66 milliseconds to get a response from www.yahoo.com. This is pretty darn good. I’m on a cable modem, with registry tweaks courtesy of Speedguide.net. They can greatly improve downstream speed on cable. Those can be found atspeedguide.net and are definitely worth installing. They’re minor registry tweaks with no danger to your system and the fine folks at speedguide even provide a set of registry defaults you can restore if you desire.
If your ping time is greater than 100ms, you have a problem.
Next, to find where the slowness is,get to a command prompt and type “tracert www.yahoo.com”. I get this:
C:\Documents and Settings\Kevin>tracert www.yahoo.com
Tracing route to www.yahoo.akadns.net [66.94.230.36]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 10 ms 8 ms 8 ms 10.228.24.1
2 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 24.31.1.201
3 8 ms 9 ms 9 ms 24.31.2.81
4 21 ms 22 ms 21 ms 12.118.239.169
5 20 ms 19 ms 20 ms tbr1-p012301.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.6.9]
6 19 ms 19 ms 18 ms ggr2-p310.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.6.65]
7 22 ms 21 ms 22 ms so-1-1-0.edge1.Chicago1.Level3.net [209.0.227.77]
8 18 ms * 19 ms so-2-1-0.bbr1.Chicago1.Level3.net [209.244.8.9]
9 65 ms 66 ms 66 ms so-0-2-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.0.218]
10 67 ms 69 ms 67 ms ge-10-2.ipcolo3.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.2.169]
11 67 ms 67 ms 68 ms unknown.Level3.net [64.152.69.30]
12 69 ms 68 ms 68 ms UNKNOWN-66-218-82-226.yahoo.com [66.218.82.226]
13 69 ms 69 ms 66 ms p5.www.scd.yahoo.com [66.94.230.36]
Trace complete.
This tells me what all the steps are that my signal is taking, and the timecount at each. If you see a large amount of time being taken at any step (greater than 100 ms) then that may be a problem.
Bear in mind that only the first couple of hops are yours. As you can see from the example above, the first hop I show is to 10.228.24.1, which must be my cable provider (I’m on a router and its IP address is the standard 192.168.1.1). If your router does show up and takes any time at all, there may be a problem with the router.
Now, the problem-solving.
First, shutting down and restarting the cable modem may work, and is certainly worth a try.
If the problem is shared bandwidth, then there’s little you can do, apart from complain to the cable co. that the bandwidth they promised is not apparent.
However, I have had the same kind of issue – going from rocket to tortoise – twice in the past. Both times it was after a power outage, and both times the issue was my router. Connecting the cable modem directly to one of our computers gave me fast internet, going through the router gave me molasses internet. Replacing the router fixed the problem.