13 Mar 11 How to increase your browsing experience with Indian ISP?

A very common discussion about the Internet speed in office, mobile or home is found in my surroundings. I went upto a experiment with Bharti Airtel’s Broadband speed. This experiment went upto 3 months and i opted from speed of 1Mbps to 4 Mbps. I even asked the ISP team to replace the wires from there tower to my home and internal home wiring to remove any signal drops.

Signal drop can be calculated from Attenuation (dB) http://192.168.1.1/statsadsl.html (this link will work if you are using the same ISP) This value should not be less than 20 for downstream. Fastest way to detect the problem if there is any kind of humming noise in your landline.

Factors which affect the browsing speed:

1. To the Ethernet connection of the router which ISP provides you – There will be more connections on that Router.
2. Wires coming to your home might be faulty which reduces the signal strength and the distance the wires are traveling, if it is more than 100 Meters than you need a booster or you have to ask your ISP to increase the signal strength.
3. Wireless/Wired (router+modem)
4. No of connections you are using with the router + modem
5. And the device’s internal Ethernet speed.
6. Speed of the website you are browsing.

There are many more in my list, but it will go way over your head, as it went over mine And the best part which blew my mind was the small thing which we studied in 11th standard’s computer books, 1 bit = 8 bytes. So if you opted for 1 Mbps, check the small “b” it is different from MBps, former means Megabits per second and later means Mega Bytes per second. And if i convert it to KBps, it comes upto 128 kilobytes, shocked? If not than below fact will. When you browse a website and say Internet is slow, check your upload speed which you didn’t even asked for? What the hell is upload speed? This speed is used when you are upload/sharing any file to the any other system, in simple words your outgoing bandwidth. It is used to keep the connection between browser and a website. And the speed which can be consumed by the  browser for Internet websites is max 32 KBps per thread, a browser starts multiple thread (in simple words multiple tabs) to open and establish a connection to the server.

More addons, more tabs will make your system and browsing slow.

Recommendations:

1. If possible don’t opt for high Internet speeds as it will only increase only the media download speed not the browsing experience.
2. Close the tabs while browsing and don’t install any addon if not required to.
3. Use native browser without addon like chrome/opera, cause firefox is slower than earlier versions.
4. Use wired Internet if possible, cause conversion of data for wireless transmission (By router) and rebuild the data by your computer will be slower than wired.
5. Don’t use more than 1 landline and joints in the wires coming from the ISP.

Happy surfing!!!