Disclaimer: This is an archived article and may contain outdated information or bad links. 

Introduction

Editor's Note: While this tweak guide is technically written for cable modems, most of these tweaks will work with xDSL as well. Back up all settings before changing. Keep in mind that some users may experience loss of performance, but most should experience a gain in performance from this guide. This is why we recommend that you back up settings before proceeding.

Ahh broadband; every gamer's dream... I'm sure you have seen all the ads on TV or heard them on the radio: "Cable modems are up to 100x faster than your conventional dial-up." "It's instant, it's faster video, it's richer graphics, better sound." Blah blah blah. So you finally decided to fork over the cash (or nag your parents => ) to get a cable modem installed. The big day arrived finally ( I had a 2-month wait for the first setup I got.) And you got it all installed and BOOM!! (Hehe) You fell off your seat because of the speed. Pages which seemed to take forever took seconds, downloads were near instant, and your gaming, most importantly of all, was smooth and awesome; without noticeable lag. This is why all those lpb's are so good...

But all good things must come to an end. As I’m sure lots of you have experienced, slowdowns became common. As more and more people signed up, it got slower. Your 100kb/s downloads slowly became 20 or even 10.. Pings began to soar higher and higher.. You start to thirst for something faster. You have begun to regress into your modem state again. You feel the need for speed.

What Happened?

This is a question that I'm sure many ponder. Well there are many reasons, but the most common would be local traffic and Internet traffic, period. Local traffic is the biggest speed cap that plagues cable modems. Cable modems work on a network/grid that connects to a T3 router running at 45 Megabits per second. Each area is a grid (a few blocks). Depending on where you live, you could have a busy grid, or a not-so-busy one. My grid for example, isn't really that busy; so I get a lot of speed. But others may not get much speed at all because there are lots of people signed up in their area using up a percentage of that T3's resources, causing it to slow down. This is the biggest fallback of cable Internet technology. The problem lies with the cable companies' lack of upgrades to their equipment to meet the needs of the consumer. There isn't much you can do besides maybe write angry letters.

Then there is Internet traffic. You can't help that either. Your best bet if you really need the speed is to pick a time where not as many people are on. I know that's hard because the whole world is connected, but if you use it at 2 AM, you really do notice a difference over say 6 PM.

Your computer's performance does affect your Internet performance as well. If your computer isn't running the best, neither will your Internet. After a format, it goes much better for me. Tweak your computer! Keep that computer clean!

What Can I Do?

Unlike old fashioned dial-up modems, there isn't a whole lot you can do to increase the speed of your cable connection. There are tweaks that make enough of a difference though. One of the single most important ones is tweaking the way your Cable connection sends the data/packets back and forth. You may have heard of things like MTU, RWin, TTL, MaxMSS, and more. If you have no clue what they are or what they do, I have made some short definitions:

MTU: Maximum Transmission Unit; MTU is the largest packet of data that can be sent at one time on the network. Raising it will allow to send more at once, but also can cause fragmentation of that data if the size requirement is not met.

RWIN: Receive Window; How much data can be sent out before the other server sends a response.

TTL: Time to Live; The total number of hops that a packet will be allowed to take.

MSS: Max segment guide; This is the largest size of a TCP send that Winsock will accept. This is set automatically though, so don't fret this.

If you are new to this whole thing, there are a plethora of great programs out there that will automatically set the best values for your connection. There are also a bunch of great 'patches' created by speedguide.net which will do the same thing. For starting, I would suggest either a program or patch, it doesn't really matter since they both do just about the same thing. Some of the most popular programs are:

EasyMTU
I-Speed
Intelli Dial-Up
Smartalec Smartplay
(Thanks Tweakfiles!)

But if a fancy program doesn't float your boat, there are the alternative speedguide patches which come in Windows 95, 98 and 2000 flavors. If you are using windows 98, use the sguide_tweak_98.zip file. You can get them here.

Editor's Note: I highly recommend downloading the @home speed patch from the cable patches section at SpeedGuide.net, even if you do not have @home!

You can also do this manually through the windows registry, but this is only suggested for advanced users that know what to do in the registry, so if you don't know what the registry is or none of this make sense, skip over the next section. Okay here goes...

First, open up a dos prompt. Then type: ping -f -l #### www.yourcableprovider.com (Ex. Rogers hosts mine, so I would do www.rogers.com ) Where the pound symbols are, substitute 1000 there. Ignore the ping numbers, but focus on wether all 4 packets were received. If 1000 is fine, move up 100 and keep doing that until you get some packet loss. When you find the highest number possible, add 28 to it, and make it your MTU setting. I have found 1460 is around where I start to lose packets so 1490 is my MTU. This is around the regular size for MTUs.

Now, in regedit go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\NetTrans and look through the 000# categories. If there is more than 1 with MaxMTU settings in there, use the 1st one, which is probably 0000. Remember your number? Well go on down to MaxMTU and put it in there. The same goes for IPMTU. Now for MaxMSS: it should get set automatically, so you don't need to touch this one. But for the sake of information, it should be set 40 lower than your MTU. :-)

Now point yourself to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\MSTCP and take a look at the TTL number. You remember the definition right? Well this is pretty self explanatory, just make it the number you want, I prefer 64, but I'm recommending 128 just to be safe. For Rwin, the best setting is to make it a multiple of your MSS setting. This one is kind of iffy, because if it's set too large you can get a lot of packet loss, but if it's set too small, it will run very slow. I have mine set to 250x higher than the MSS setting. If you play a lot of online games, setting a smaller Rwin will give you lower pings. Play with this setting a little bit to find your own 'sweet spot'. Make sure SackOpts is set to 1 (on) and PMTUDiscovery is set to 0 (off) as well.