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I get this question a lot of times. How do you speed up your Streamyx connection? (For those not familiar with it, Streamyx is an internet broadband service here in Malaysia). Not that I’m an expert in this field. Working in the IT field for the past few years, I get people telling me that they barely get the advertised connection speed from their internet connections, especially when downloading files from the net. Now, if you’re asking how to get like the full 1Mbps from a 1Mbps connection, then I would just answer - that’s not possible. For non-technical users, the advertised connection speed means it is provided on a best-effort basis, meaning that you will get only ‘almost’ that speed for most of the time, unless you’re on a leased line connection.

However, I do pity some people who for a long time have been getting only about 50% of the speed that they are paying for, when it should be around 90% or so (To check the speed you’re getting from TM Net, go to the TM Net Speedometer website to test your speed). So, because this entry is about the ‘easiest’ way to speed up your connection, I would recommend using a piece of software called TCP Optimizer.

For a non-techie answer to tune your connection, TCP Optimizer is as simple as it gets. Just go to www.speedguide.net/downloads.php and download the software. No installation required, just run the console, select the connection speed you are supposed to be getting, check the ‘optimal settings’ check box and apply the changes. After a reboot, go test your speed one more time and you should notice a slight increase.

Here is an example of the speed I got from a 512Kbps connection. 464Kbps is about 90% of the advertised speed, which is acceptable.

Direct downloads gets around 20-50KBps, which is around 150-400Kbps, which is also acceptable.

For torrents, too many factors affects the performance, like traffic shaping and seeds availability. This make it a not so good connection speed performance indicator.

Again I’m not an expert in this, but from what I know, TCP Optimizer automates the resizing of the MTU packet size of your connection settings to the optimal value. To further optimize your speed, a little bit of fine tuning is required and you can find articles on this around the web, even specific instructions for your individual routers and modems.

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