patrick.net

Ok, your seeing the link speed between your mac and the wireless router. It has nothing to do with the speed from your router out to the world.

Try http://speedtest.net to see how fast your connection actually is.

Think of it like this. You have water piped into your house from the city or whomever. It comes into your house in a 1" pipe say, and you can get 5-10 gallons/minute from the pipe. Now even if you used 10" pipe inside your walls to go to each room you would never get more than the 5-10 gallons/minute that you can get from the main pipe.

Your internet works the same way. You can connect to the router at any speed but it will never be faster to the internet than your cable modem speed. However you will be able to transfer files inside your house/network faster, i.e. if you copy a file from one computer to another then it will help.

Did that make any sense?

I know that if you have a ooold cable modem upgrading to a new one that supports DOCSIS 3.0 can get you significant speed improvements outside of what the ISP says your connection is rated for assuming that they've been upgrading their infrastructure accordingly.

I was getting 38Mb down and 10Mb up in southern CA when I upgraded to this modem here:
http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-SB6120-SURFboard-eXtreme-Broadband/dp/B001UI2FPE/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1336241470&sr=1-2

I think I had their 30Mb down/5Mb up service.

Prior to getting that modem I think I had a 8 or 9 yr old pre DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem. I was getting around 22Mb down and 3 or 4Mb up with that thing with the same service package. It was much faster to "boot up" than the newer one though.

But yea the poster above me is right, switching out your router won't improve your dl or ul speeds at all.

A new router can have a better and faster built in firewall though which might explain some improvement in a home environment. Moving from an older Linksys WRT54G router to the much faster Netgear N600 made a big difference too after upgrading the modem and that was when using wired connections, not wireless. I'm sure with all the improvements with wireless tech in the last 3 or 4 years the improvement would've been even bigger, but I almost never use the wireless signal.

WoodsyTheOwl says

Ok, your seeing the link speed between your mac and the wireless router. It has nothing to do with the speed from your router out to the world.

Try http://speedtest.net to see how fast your connection actually is.

Think of it like this. You have water piped into your house from the city or whomever. It comes into your house in a 1" pipe say, and you can get 5-10 gallons/minute from the pipe. Now even if you used 10" pipe inside your walls to go to each room you would never get more than the 5-10 gallons/minute that you can get from the main pipe.

Your internet works the same way. You can connect to the router at any speed but it will never be faster to the internet than your cable modem speed. However you will be able to transfer files inside your house/network faster, i.e. if you copy a file from one computer to another then it will help.

Did that make any sense?

Speedtest says I get 19Mbps. Is this what I'm "actually" getting? Cause according to my tw subscription I'm paying for the 5-10Mbps rate.

Yes. Speedtest uses raw data for the test, there's no http or other compression.

CrazyMan says

Yes. Speedtest uses raw data for the test, there's no http or other compression.

So why am I getting a faster speed than the 5-10MbpsI'm supposedly limited to?

AFAIK they don't really limit you, that is just a minimum they're guaranteeing for your service plan.