Internet FAQ
Since many connectivity issues are eventually traced to DNS problems, you can add to, or even replace your ISP's nameservers with other public ones.
A good alternative is the public DNS services from the Open Root-Server Confederation, which cover some new TLD listings that many other nameservers don't yet include. Below is a list of available ORSC DNS servers you can use (I'd choose ones that are geographically close to you):
199.166.28.10 (PS0.NS2.VRX.NET) - Atlanta, Ga
199.166.29.3 (nl.public.rootfix.net) - Nederlands
199.166.31.3 (NS1.QUASAR.NET) - Orlando, FL, USA
204.57.55.100 (NS1.JERKY.NET) - Boston, MA, USA
199.5.157.128 (ASLAN.OPEN-RSC.ORG) - Detroit, MI, USA
It is comparatively easy to share your residential Internet connection, generally there are three ways you can go. You should always check with your ISP to make sure that this is legal to do under their agreement as well. The first, the easiest and recommended way of sharing your Internet connection is by using a router. Check our "Hardware Reviews", we've reviewed numerous products in this category. Many routers have multiple LAN ports, so sharing your connection is as simple as plugging every PC to the router.
Another way of sharing your connection is by using one PC as a server (with two Network cards installed), and running software, such as ICS, or Sygate, which routes traffic to other PCs on your local network. You still need a hub, or a switch if you have more than two PCs.
If you already have a LAN setup with a hub/switch, you could also ask your ISP to provide you with a second external IP address, and you won't have to install any additional software/hardware. The only downside is that residential ISPs usually charge $5/$10 monthly for providing you with those additional IP addresses.
Many ISPs provide web proxy servers, used for caching content locally. Generally, if you use a Proxy server, when you try to access a website, it will first check if the page has already been cached in the web proxy server. If it is cached, you will get the copy form the proxy server, rather than the original page from the website.
By using proxy servers, your ISP saves bandwidth, however it often creates problems. Accessing secured websites might not work properly, you can actually get lower performance, depending on the quality of the server. You'd have to test to see which works better for you.
Generally we recommend not using your ISP's web proxy servers to avoid the usual congestion and problems associated with them.
A common misconception is that residential DSL is dedicated bandwidth, while Cable modems provide shared medium.
This is only partly true - for the segment between you and the ISP's central office, and that is rarely the bottleneck of the connection. From the Central Office out to the Internet, both Cable and DSL share your ISP's backbones, whatever they are. Residential broadband is oversubscribed, whether cable or DSL - usually with 10 times as many subscribers as the maximum backbone capacity. Since the backbones are most likely the bottleneck of the Internet connection, and it is shared medium, both residential DSL and Cable may experience slowdowns at peak times.
All hosts on the Internet are not equal... It all depends on your ISP's backbones, and their peering arrangements with other companies.
For example, one site might be just a few nodes away, on your ISP's main backbone. Traffic is much cheaper for your ISP, and naturally they have much more bandwidth available on their own backbones. The effect is similar with small ISP's, who lease a single line from one provider - the throughput is usually higher to hosts that are closer.
Other hosts, on the other hand might be cross-country and the path uses congested backbones from different providers, with which your ISP has peering arrangements, and your speed will vary greatly. Cheaper bandwidth might be assigned lower priority, will experience higher latency, travel over congested paths, more likely to experience packet loss, etc. In theory, each packet can travel on a different path, depending on the current line conditions and how routers forward it.
In practice, residential customers usually get much higher throughput from their ISP's local hosts (and online speed tests), than hosts many hops away, over different backbones. Sometimes, it is also possible to get an exceptionally good throughput from a lightly used path, even if it is far from you, simply because of the dynamics of the network traffic at the time.
A traceroute usually provides a good feel of how many hops the path to a host is, what is their latency, and how it increases with each node on the path. It also shows what hosts are on the path to your destination.