How to Optimize Your Internet Connection to Get 100 % Bandwidth

Most of Internet connections are working below capacity. A simple bandwidth test would reveal that your own Internet connection is working well below its capacity. some times below 60% of the bandwidth is utilized. Below are some of the tricks I have collected that may help you get most juice out of your internet connection.

Increase bandwidth by tweaking QoS in Windows XP Pro

The following tweak applies only to Windows XP Professional edition. The default system behavior is that all 100% bandwidth is available, however, if there is a running application that indicates to the OS it needs to send high priority/real time data, then as long as it has the socket open, Windows XP will restrict “best effort” traffic to 80% of the bandwidth so that high priority traffic can be accommodated. Basically, applications can make this request to the operating system for QoS support using the QoS application programming interfaces (APIs) in Windows and this only applies if a specific app is requesting QoS.

If you’d like to change how much bandwidth is reserved for QoS (the default is 20% of the total bandwidth), do the following:

• Make sure you’re logged in as “Administrator” (not just any account with admin privileges).
• Navigate to START>Run and type: gpedit.msc
• Navigate to Local Computer Policy > Administrative Templates > Network > QOS Packet Scheduler
• In the right window, double-click the limit reservable bandwidth setting
• On the setting tab, check the enabled setting.
• Where it says “Bandwidth limit %”, change it to read 0 (or whatever percentage you want to reserve for high priority QoS data)
• Click OK, close gpedit.msc
• Under START > My Computer > My Network Connections > View Network Connections, right-click on your connection and under Properties (where it lists your protocols), make sure QOS Packet Scheduler is enabled.

Host Name Resolution Priority Tweak Windows 2k/XP

The tweak desribed below helps boost priority for DNS & hostname resolution in general. What this means is, it helps web pages load faster, and has negligible effect on downloads (not counting the couple of ms gain with the host resolution at connect-time). Applying this tweak assumes some proficiency in editing the Windows Registry using Regedit (Start > Run > type: regedit). As always, backup your Registry before making any changes so you can revert to the previous state if you don’t like the results.

First, open the Windows Registry using Regedit, and (after backing up) navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\ServiceProvider

Note the following lines (all hex dwords):

Class = 008 (8) – indicates that TCP/IP is a name service provider, don’t change. LocalPriority = 1f3 (499) – local names cache HostsPriority = 1f4 (500) – the HOSTS file DnsPriority = 7d0 (2000) – DNS NetbtPriority = 7d1 (2001) – NetBT name-resolution, including WINS

What we’re aiming to do is increase the priority of the last 4 settings, while keeping their order. The valid range is from -32768 to +32767 and lower numbers mean higher priority compared to other services. What we’re aiming at is lower numbers without going to extremes, something like what’s shown below should work well:

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