Leave On or Not???

Apart from saving the environment (and electricty bill) is there a good reason that I should leave my modem router on during the day if it's not been used?

I guess there won't be so will probably turn it off anyway, but just wondered.

It's really up to you. I leave it on so that the connection's available all the time, and I like my speed to be constant and stable.

So if I turn it off at night and then back on the following evening, there may be speed drops?

The reason I ask is because I signed up with a newsgroup provider and found that the speeds were very slow. Using 7 threads at a time I was only getting around 2 Meg download speeds.

They were very helpful and offered a refund due to the slow speeds, which I think is brilliant customer service.

In reply to:

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So if I turn it off at night and then back on the following evening, there may be speed drops?

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No, I'm saying that there could be speed changes. The noise margin on my line changes during the day. In the morning, I can get sync speeds of 4.9Mbps, but the noise margin will fall during the day until it gets to a point where I either see a disconnection or slow throughput. I rather have it synced up in the evening at a more realistic speed that doesn't change and stays connected. 4.3Mbps seems to be the sweet spot for my line on Sky.

If your line has bags of margin to spare and always syncs at the full speed then switching off at night shouldn't affect the speed you connect at.

Edited by Pandemonium (Fri 16-Mar-07 08:38:14)

whats this sync speed all about then? is the speed not constantly variable depending on the line conditions, contention ratios etc.?

The sync speed is determined when your connection to the exchange is first set up and it depends on your line conditions at the time. Line conditions will change and a drop in noise margin can cause disconnections. That's what I want to avoid. I don't want the router syncing at a high speed in the morning only to give a disconnection/reconnection in the evening to a lower speed.

Contention ratio is another thing altogether. I'm talking about raw line speed.

Just another thought, if I have Sky TV and have this plugged into the phone socket (via filter) would it be better to plug it into this instead of the filter with the telephone?

Shouldn't make any difference.