FTTC browsing speed

Got FTTC installed yesterday and apart from a few niggles I am getting speeds of 74/16 however I was expecting browsing to be snappier, at best I would say it is slightly quicker but I was expecting a significant boost to page loading times. I have tried one large download and I got 8.5 MB/sec so it is fast.

Could this be an MTU or RWIN type setting?

More likely to be browser-based or DNS.

Try different browsers, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari.

Try different DNS servers, Google, OpenDNS.

Increasing number of threads browser users and ensuring your DNS lookups are fast is main thing.

It depends what Broadband connection you have come from... A web page with 100 Kb of data will load at the same speed on a 1 Mb connection as it will on a 74 Mb connection.

You may see slight improvement because you upstream is so much faster and also because your latency should (probably) have reduced.

There are lots of factors, not just raw download / upload speed.

In my DLink router, the DNS servers are set at 0.0.0.0 - I assume that means I am using Plusnet DNS servers. Is that wrong?

Not wrong at all, perfectly normal.

It is a case of finding which DNS work best for you, and sometimes putting the ISP DNS IP directly onto the PC can improve things, as some routers can be slow at handling DNS queries.

Sorry to harp on

I have specidifed my ISP DNS serers in my router settings but I have discovered that my PC has TCP/IP4 setting which are set to "Obtain DNS server automatically", should they be set to the same as the router? Does one take precedence?

The PC settings will take precedence, so one test you can do it to set the PC to Google DNS 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and see if that speeds things up.

in reality once you get a above a few mbit/sec then web browsing wont feel faster on faster speeds unless the sites are media heavy like lots of big images.

it will make things like youtube hd videos stream faster and file downloads faster.

I would recommend GRC DNS Bench to find the best DNS servers for you.

In my case when I had Virgin Media, I used the Google DNS and OpenDNS servers, then when I performed the benchmark and noticed they were slower than the VM ones, I used two primary VM ones and one Google one.

Edited by Saltank (Tue 15-Jan-13 12:06:15)