Manfred Kuechler
Hunter College

(Last page update: September 8, 1999)

What determines the speed of your Internet connection?

The connection to the Internet (Web, e-mail server) can be painfully slow at times from both your office and your home. And with faster Internet access from home (DSL, cable) now becoming available, and plenty of hype in the advertisement, it may help to look at the question of speed in some more detail before making any decisions.

How you get a web page displayed on your screen or how fast a file is downloaded to your computer depends on several factors:

The weakest link in this chain determines the final result and as a user you can only influence the first two factors (links). So, you cannot really do much if you need to connect regularly to a site (say, just as example, Hunter College) that has under powered servers and/or a troubled connection to its ISP. But let's look at each factor in turn:

Your station

As to the "power" of your station, a faster processor can hurt but is less important than memory. Any "clock speed" over 200 MHz (and even today's low end stations offer this) will do, so invest in additional memory first if you want to upgrade the machine. Here, the rule is that you cannot have enough and 64 MB is a good start. The third component is your video card where the situation is more complicated and there is not just one figure to be considered. Some video cards allow to add extra video memory, and that's an option to be considered. Be aware that video memory is much more expensive than the 'regular' memory; as a rule of thumb 4 MB of video memory cost about as much as 64 MB of regular memory. If you buy a new station, make sure your video card has at least 4 MB memory.

If your station is on the lower end of "power", refrain from multitasking while browsing the web and/or access other Internet services, i.e. close all programs (applications) that are not immediately needed. Also, since some programs do not nicely clean up after you close them, consider restarting your station before you access the Web/Internet.

So, that's the hardware part. Browsers (like Netscape) have become smarter and check on your system resources during installation and make choices for the size of the "cache" (there is a memory cache and a disk cache) accordingly. For the most part, you want to stay with choices the software made for you, but no harm in experimenting a bit. In Netscape Edit"/ "Preferences"/ "Advanced"/ "Cache" gets you to the cache setup window. However, bigger is not always better in terms of a browser cache.
As to general file transfers (uploading/downloading), you can let your browser do the job and, yes, Netscape does support "ftp". (Just enter an ftp address in the location box -- like: ftp://eresuser@maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu -- and you will be asked for the password.) At Hunter, we have a site license for QVT which is primarily used for "telnet" but which has also an ftp module. And while the ftp interface is convenient and allows for multiple file transfers via clicking and dragging, it is very slow and may not fully utilize the connection speed available. Ftp via Netscape is much faster though less convenient.
If you have installed the RealPlayer (now comes automatically with Netscape 4.61) make sure that the "normal bandwidth" (from "Options"/ "Preferences"/ "Connection") matches the speed of your ISP connection. So, should you upgrade from a 56K modem connection to say DSL, you need to change the RealPlayer configuration or it will not take advantage of the improved speed now available. In general, check all software used for Internet related  tasks whether they have specific "connection" settings -- which may need adjustment.

Connection to your ISP

No matter what connection you look at, keep in mind the number (28.8, 56K, 640 DSL, T1, T3, etc.) defines the maximum possible speed not what you should expect to get in reality. On average, a good 56K connection will give you 30-40 kbps (kilobits per second), and a 28.8 connection will rarely give you more than 20 kbps. So, yes you double the speed when upgrading from 28.8 modem to a 56K modem, but it is not what you may expect looking at the labels. Also, a DSL connection with 640 kbps is asymmetric in the first place, meaning that uploads are considerable slower than downloads, but even downloads hardly reach 400 kbps. But, again, relatively speaking, you are "up to 12 times faster" than with a 56K modem -- so there is some truth in advertising.

However, don't be fooled: your web browsing will not be 12 times faster. As said above, the connection to your ISP is only one link in a longer chain. Consider traffic congestion of a two lane highway where for some limited stretch four lanes become available: yes, on this stretch traffic speeds up, but overall the time to get from A to B does not decrease dramatically. You will see the most marked improvement in the following situations:

But be prepared for some disappointment, a faster connection to your ISP will not solve all "World Wide Wait" problems. If you decide to stay with a conventional dialup connection using a regular modem, consider to tweak your DUN to get the most out of this connection.

Internet traffic

As the Internet emerged in a rather uncoordinated way and there are quite a few major players involved who must work together on some level while being fierce competitor on another, the Internet is quite a mess with any patches and fixes and a number of subnets with only limited number of interconnection points (NAPs). Delays on the Internet are as frequent as traffic congestions on the LIE (Long Island Expressway). The connection between your home computer and the site you want to visit is anything but direct (e.g., it takes 15 "hops" or relay points to connect from my home in Chelsea to Hunter and the connection is made via Washington, DC -- and between 10 and 20 hops are quite normal for connecting to anywhere outside your "domain"). Each relay point is a potential source for trouble (delay), and so you are likely to hit such delays quite frequently. For the most part, traffic is still moving so things are just a little slower, but at times nothing goes and you can't even reach the site. Such shutdowns often last just a few minutes, but I have experienced shutdowns of several hours.

The only thing you can do about such a problem is to switch to an alternate ISP. As this alternate ISP may use another routing, you may be able to reach your destination this way. (It's like taking the GCP/Northern instead of the LIE to go to Long Island by car.) As fairly reliable free ISPs have become available, this is indeed a realistic option. It is typically not difficult to set up connections to two different ISPs via dialup. It can be a bit trickier to have both a dialup connection (say to free Altavista) and a fast network connection (DSL, LAN/T1 at Hunter) ready to go simultaneously. I am still working on getting this done with my new DSL connection, but I always had a backup (via regular modem) at Hunter.

Connection between the "other" ISP and your target site (e.g., Hunter)

Few people ever look into this and you need to use some network utility (called "tracert"; a basic version comes with Win9x) to determine the "hops" along the way. The IP names of these hops reveal the other ISP and often indicate the speed. Major commercial and institutional sites have at least a T1 if not a T3 connection (a T1 connection consists of 24 channels of 64 kbps each or a total of 1544 kbps; a T3 connection has 672 such channels, 28 times the capacity of a T1 connection). As an example, Hunter like many other CUNY colleges is connected to CIS (57th Street, CUNY's central computing facility) via a T1 connection, and CIS is connected to the Internet via a T3 connection. In the past, we have experienced intermittent problems with both the T1 connection between CIS and Hunter and the T3 connection between CIS and the "world".

In theory, then, you should expect blazing speed when using an office or lab station at Hunter. But, unfortunately, as every Internet user at Hunter knows, this ain't so. The reason is twofold:

  1. Your connection request to an external web site must make it from your station to the "gateway". For the most part, no problem on the weekends or late at night when few people are around, but increasingly a problem during weekdays. And while additional computers in faculty offices and new Internet capable stations in the labs are great, somebody forgot that the internal network is not able to handle all this traffic. It's like admitting more and more students and having no classrooms or classrooms without a sufficient number of chairs.
  2. On top of an outdated "infrastructure" (hubs, chassis, routers, bridges, etc.), Hunter has paid little attention to guard its networks from attacks by hackers and pranksters. There is no "firewall" in place, no IDS (Intrusion Defense System). Consequently, Hunter has suffered from quite a few such attacks, many of those are so-called DoS (denial of service) attacks where the system is swamped by a huge number of nonsense requests (each one legitimate when used as intended) that slow legitimate traffic down or -- in the worst case -- bring it to a still stand.
So, what describes Hunter may apply to other sites you try to connect to. And there is hardly anything you can do about. As a faculty of staff member with an office station at Hunter, you set this office station as your entry point and connect to this station via a telephone modem calling your office number. But this is it. Students simply have to put up with the snail's pace requests for web (course) pages are fulfilled or -- worse yet -- they have to wait till the servers at Hunter become available again.

Power of the server hosting the pages or files

Again, little you can do about this. Many sites get overwhelmed with the requests they get and their server(s) simply cannot fulfill your requests as quickly as they come in. The results are lines (waiting queues) like in an overcrowded McDonalds. Power of course is relative to the "hits" a server gets. A plain Pentium II box for about $1000 may do as long as the demand is low, and even a specialized server with a purchase price of several thousand dollars may be inadequate if the demand is high. As of now, the web servers at Hunter are adequate for the current demand, but this may change as more faculty put up course web pages, and consequently more students request pages -- and as the contents of such pages gets more complex including multimedia files. Earlier in 1999, the Hunter mail server often had unacceptable response times (mostly due to inefficient administration), but by and large these problems have been resolved (at least more powerful hardware has been installed).

The only remedy available to a user is to use times with less traffic. For example, it is difficult and -- if successful at all -- very time consuming to download the monthly anti-virus updates from McAfee (NAI) during regular work hours. But over the weekend, late at night, or very early in the morning, there is no problem whatsoever.
 

Conclusion

Upgrade to V.90 (56K). I hope you realize by now that the speed (bandwidth) of your connection to your ISP is only one factor. So, upgrading from a 28.8 modem to one supporting the new V.90 (formerly x2 or 56K) standard is certainly worth the money. Almost all ISPs support this standard by now and it usually does not cost more. Be aware, however, that depending on your location and your ISP, even your theoretical maximum speed will be lower. Due to some FCC regulations it cannot exceed 53K, but the initial connection may be established at an even lower speed; in Windows move your mouse over the dialup icon in the taskbar tray (lower right corner of your screen) and the maximum connection speed will show. If your ISP consistently produces connections below 53K, it may be time to look for another.

Upgrade to DSL. Well, there are very good introductory offers. Now is the time to get into this relatively cheaply. But don't expect miracles, and be prepared for some glitches. I got mine less than a week ago, and so far, so good -- despite an extended service outage on Monday afternoon. Unless you are in the habit of downloading big files very often and/or frequently visiting web sites with cutting edge technology (e.g., streaming video), you may want to upgrade the power of your station and optimize your 56K connection first -- as this may give you a better value in improving your Internet access (web browsing).