Causes for slow internet speed and how to improve?

[Jedi5]

What are some of the causes for slow internet speed?
How can you one minute have great speed and then 1 minute later you are back to the old days of dial up for the rest of the day?

Lately this has been happening to me more and more and I really don't know what would be causing this. I haven't tinkered with anything on my iMac or MBP.

I have a wireless Linksys router which has worked great with my Macs no problem. But now... now... I feel like chucking everything out of a window.

I did a speed test and got 82kbps down 311kbps up.

I have dry loop dsl, the basic which has worked great for me for the last 2 yrs.

Thoughts?

 

[Consultant]

- Routers die. Have you tried rebooting the router?
- Interference. (say wireless landline phones, microwave, other stations)

Probably the first.

Install widget to see whether your wifi overlaps neighbor's
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/airlock_danielpimley.html

 

[Jedi5]

What's the average lifespan on a router? I think I've had mine... for about 5 yrs or so.

I did reboot the router and my speed came back no problem.
Then as time went on last night, my speed started to slow down.

But now my connection is great. I don't get it.

 

[dissolve]

What's the average lifespan on a router? I think I've had mine... for about 5 yrs or so.

I did reboot the router and my speed came back no problem.
Then as time went on last night, my speed started to slow down.

But now my connection is great. I don't get it.

Sounds like the router. Have you tried connecting directly to your modem via ethernet and testing that? That would at least eliminate the ISP as the culprit.

 

[bmcgonag]

May sound crazy, but if you haven't tried it, get a shop vac, or extension like that for your regular vac, unplug the router, and vacuum out all the ports you can find on it.

Plug it back in and see how it does. This helped on 2 of my routers tremendously. It's part of my 6 month maintenance routine now. But, routers do die eventually. Also, if you can see attached devices through your routers control panel, make sure you don't have someone leeching off your bandwidth.

 

[tinla]

Hi!!!!

It is a good information about internet speed test!!!!
I test my internet speed, through this site www.ip-details.com/internet-speed-test
My speed test results are,
upload speed:0.52 kbps
download speed:1.96 kbps
I check my speed test before and after of the downloading process!!!!!!