How do I increase my download speed?

4 thoughts on “How do I increase my download speed?”

1. ayhan says:

   June 12, 2011 at 6:45 pm

   you can use proxies to speed it up connection. even google has started it.

2. JoelKatz says:

   June 12, 2011 at 6:45 pm

   How are you measuring your maximum download speed? If you’re connecting over WiFi, then probably the wireless speed is the limiting factor. In any event, 5.4Mbps is an incredibly respectable download speed.

3. ray_diator says:

   June 12, 2011 at 6:45 pm

   You can’t do much about your download speed as it is dictated by your:

   1) ISP
   2) General traffic on the Internet
   3) Bandwidth restriction at busy times of day

   It doesn’t matter how good your hardware is, you can only move as fast as the weakest link in the chain.

4. Adrian says:

   June 12, 2011 at 6:45 pm

   try to check your download speed at:
   http://www.speedtest.net

   Also, if your computer is 8 years old, it may have an older PCI network card that is interrupt intensive (or your on-board ethernet card is poor performer). The old card may not have a lot of "smarts" or buffer space. See if you can find another used network card, a different make, to test it out. Worst case, spend $20 and buy a new card – it’s likely to have more smarts in it.

   I know this for a fact. I have a Linux based firewall with 3 network cards (NIC) in it. When I was doing local LAN tests between 2 cards, I had slow transfer rates (20-30mbps), but between two others, it was over 90 mbps. One of the cards was an older PCI card that relied on software to pump a lot of data, vs the newer cards that had more "smarts" on board and better buffer space, to handle the high speed load. The NIC cards I use now are Intel chipsets, and they all work fine at full speed.

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