:: Cable modem speed tweaks

There are things you can do to improve your high-speed connection, but different people experience different results. Some will see dramatic improvements, others might see small gains and a few can see their performance worsen.

Uncapping is done on a central computer, which we can’t access, but we can change our own computer settings to improve speed.

Most computers are set at the factory to use an office Ethernet network or a dial-up modem. High-speed modems work best with different settings. There are two ways of changing these settings. The simplest way is to let a program do it. There are a number of them out there.

By tweaking your Windows registry, you can improve the performance of your TCP/IP connection on a cable modem or DSL modem. Here we will discuss how to go about doing it by downloading software.

Step 1 is to test your current speed, so that you have some concrete data to compare before and after. Undertake an FTP download from a server located at the CMTS head-end. By using a server at the head-end, the test will hopefully not be depending on too many Internet bottlenecks. You will need to find a suitable server and a good big file. Also make sure you are not being tricked by some caching along the way – download the file a couple of times and compare the download times.

Back up your registry.
Use Start Menu>Run... and type REGEDIT to invoke the registry editor. Use Registry>Export Registry File... to backup the registry. Make sure you have All selected in the Export range box.

Then tweak your registry. For Windows 95/98 or Windows NT or Windows 2000/XP download the registry from the Url www.cablemodems.org and change the TCP Receive Window settings to 32767.

Windows 2000/XP note: The TCP/IP stack in 2000/XP automatically adjusts the setting, if you don't specify something. So while this tweak will not hurt anything, it will disable this automatic adoption to the line latency.

Now test your new speed. If your speed has improved it is good, if it has gone down, then undo the tweaking by importing the backup copy made earlier. Note that you should try to do the test under similar load conditions, i.e. same time of the day etc. Again make sure you are not being tricked by some caching along the way – download the file a couple of times and compare the download times.