router settings?

Question

I have cable internet, around 3 Mbps, very decent speed, but I am often not getting this speed on my computers. Right now my connection speed is around 500 Kbps, which is six times below the potential. I have a router and it seems like when I restart it and the cable modem, the speed goes back up. Then after a while it's down again.

Does my problem lie within the router? Is there a setting I could change to fix this?

I have Lynksys G router.

I also have a problem with Yahoo Messenger. I work on a Mac, and have recently installed the new 3.0 beta version of the Messenger, and when I start it, if it sits idle for ten minutes or so, it signs off and then signs back in. It does so two or three times, and then quits altogether. Can it also be because of some router setting?

Thank you if you can help.

Answer 1

How are you testing the speed? Some places you download from may simply not have connections as fast as you - or they may have many people downloading at the same time.

Is anyone else using your network? Are you SURE? People sometimes "steal" your internet connection using your wireless if you don't have it secured - and you really can't tell who.

Lastly, in my experience 50% of the Computer/Technology professionals like Linksys products - I'm in the other 50% who don't. I've seen MANY problems over the years with Linksys products and I DO NOT recommend them. Try someone else. Personally, I tend to recommend SMC when going cheap. But even recently, a client of mine had their home router continually failing (roughly once per day) - worked fine after a reboot... but this is a woman who still can't figure out printing so you can imagine how much fun it was walking her through the reboot of a router.

Answer 2

If you are connecting wirelessly, then 500kbps is the fastest you are going to get for download speed on average. The Yahoo! Messenger symptoms you are talking about are classic wireless issues. Remember- even if you have the fastest internet connection out there (which I believe is somwhere in the 15Mbps range and $400/month) if the server you are trying to access is conneted to a dialup connection you are only going to access it as fast as the dial up connection can go.

Linksys has great online chat support go to support.linksys.com and look for it. They will give you and "official" answer.

Answer 3

The first answer was right on. You won't experience 3Mbps (that's Mega-BITS, not Mega-BYTES) because of various connections on the way from your modem to your cable provider and so forth.

Answer 4

Are you using your router wired or wireless?

If wireless is it fully secured? If not perhaps someone is helping themselves to your access point!

Make sure you are using these settings in the router config,


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wireless tab:

Wireless Network Mode : G-Only
Wireless Network Name (SSID):
Wireless Channel : 8 - 2.447GHz
Wireless SSID Broadcast : Enable

Where your SSID is known only to you.

Lots of help here,

http://forums.linksys.com/

Have fun but be safe!