Troubleshooting your Modem and Internet Connection

Troubleshooting your connection.

Author/s: Roger Gann

You have a nice shiny modem, top of the range computer and the fastest ISP on the planet, but your connection speed is still in single figures. It's the Net's fault, right? Not necessarily. Roger Gann tells you how you can get the most out of your modem

Show me someone who says their Internet connection is plenty fast enough, and I'll show you someone who's being economical with the truth. It doesn't matter how fast your Net connection is, it's rarely ever fast enough. Some lucky souls now have always-on broadband connections, but the vast majority of us, myself included, still have to make do with ye olde dial-up. While you'll never get a V.90 modem to break the sound barrier, there are a number of steps you can take to boost the speed of your Internet connection.

Your Net connection speed is determined by a number of factors, and how well they all work together:

* Computer-its hardware and memory capacity determine how fast it will be.

* Modem speed -- cable modems through to slow modems.

* Phone lines--the weather, believe it or not, is a factor.

* Service provider-the number of people using your ISP and the speed of the IS P's connection to the Net.

* The Internet backbone -- congestion or technical problems can ruin your online experience.

* Web sites you're connecting to-they're subject to the same factors as you. You don't have much influence over the last three, but you can do something about the first three. Usually, the only way to speed up your computer involves spending hard-earned cash. But the good news is that the second and third items can be dealt with at a cost of precisely nothing. If you're looking to tweak your connection to the absolute maximum, you have to be willing to invest the time necessary to test, then change settings, then retest, then change settings, and so on. Luckily, there are tools available to make the process easier.

You might not have any control over the performance of the internet beyond your phone socket, but it's possible to use simple diagnostics to track down where your Internet problem lies. Have you ever logged on to the Internet and were not able logo to a particular site? Or maybe it was unusually slow that day?

Windows 9X comes with two small but useful utilities, Ping and Tracert, that can help you gauge the quality of the connection between your computer and the Web site that you are trying to reach on the Internet.

Both Ping and Tracert, which is short for TraceRoute, show you how fast or slow the Internet is between your computer and the computer you're trying to reach. Ping will tell you if the computer you're trying to contact is responding, and Tracert will find exactly where the problem is if you can't get to that Web page you need. Both utilities are installed, by default in the \Windows \Command folder, These are DOS utilities and so have to be run from a Command prompt- the easiest way to do this is to click Start, Programs then MS-DOS Prompt.

To explain what a Ping is, let's use an analogy. Suppose you called one of your friends on the phone. If your friend stays silent for some time, you might ask, "Are you there?" and your friend should reply with, "I'm here!". That's a human-to-human ping. The Ping command is similar for two computers. All Ping does is ask the computer at the other end to respond.

Ping pang

In the screenshot above, I've Pinged the BBC Web site (C:\[greater than] ping www.bbc.co.uk) and it has responded to my request in about 100ms, or one tenth of a second.

Now for a little explanation of what you see. The bytes mean how much data was received back from this particular server, The time means how long it took to reach you. And the TTL (Time To Live) means how long the data that you sent is kept in the memory of the computer that you're trying to reach. This also is a crude DNS test since it shows that the URL has been successfully resolved into an P address, 212.58.240.32.

Note that not all sites respond to Pings - Microsoft and MSN don't for example, so the mere fact that a site doesn't return a Ping and you get a 'Request timed out' response, doesn't mean there's a fault. So be sure to try more than one site.

But say you got a 'Request timed out' on a site that should return a Ping- the next thing you should do is run a Tracert. This'll tell you where the problem lies by tracing the route it takes to get to the computer you're trying to reach. This utility tells you each router your packets cross when trying to reach your destination.

In my example (see screenshot above), you can see there were 12 hops between me and the BBC site. Even thought was in London, my connection went via New York. The first number is the 'hop' or router number the route takes. The next three numbers are the round-trip times in milliseconds for three tries to reach that router. The last column is the hostname of the responding system.

The most common cause of disconnects is tine noise, pure and simple--you can use the phone engineer's self-test number 17070 to perform a 'quiet line' test to see how your line fairs.

The second cause is call waiting -- the notification 'beep' confuses the modem. If you only have one phone line, disable it with #43# before dialling out. To check if it's 'on', key in *#43#. Another cause of disconnects are idle timeouts- settings that automatically drop the line after a specified period of inactivity. Check these by looking at the Connection tab of your modem properties. The default is that this Feature is disabled,

No gain, no pain

Lots of people use a long extension lead from the phone socket to the modem, and these can be responsible for far more speed loss than most people realise. As a rule, try to keep all phone leads as short as possible. Having loads of extension sockets with phone devices plugged into them can cause problems as well.

Principally, it can overload the Ring Equivalence Number [REN] of your system--you typically should have a total REN of 4 If you exceed this value, it'll mean that one or more of them won't ring if someone phones you, but it also affects the connection speed the modem can establish.

Line gain is another issue. Each device will consume power from the line and might not leave enough for the modem. Testing this out is easy enough -- detach every extra device and see if it makes a difference. If it does, reattach them one by one to see which one is the culprit. Don't forget that if you have a digital set top box, it has to be plugged into your phone line, and this could affect your modem's performance.

Sometimes, if you have a bad line, asking BT to up the line gain can help. Normally, BT applies Automatic Gain Control (AGC) to each line, so when you make the request this feature is normally switched off. AGC is OK for voice calls but it's not necessarily optimal for modems as the modem usually controls its own gain and the two can conflict. Sometimes decreasing the gain can improve performance. If you're close to the exchange, you don't need much gain, but if you live some way away, your line needs more juice.

Tweaking your settings Your computer settings could be getting in the way of a speedy connection. All they need is a Little tweak and you could be zooming along

Open up the Control Panel and double-click the Network icon. Under the Configuration tab, select the Dial-Up Adapter and click Properties. Go to the Bindings tab and uncheck all boxes except the TCP/IP box. Select the Advanced tab and set Enable Point To Point IP to No (unless you routinely accept incoming calls using your modem). Set IP Packet Size to Large, and Record Log File to No. If you mostly use the Internet to download files and view Web pages, enable IPX Header Compression, otherwise disable it.

Next, select the TCP/IP protocol (if you have multiple copies of the protocol installed, use the one for your dial-up adapter/modem) and click Properties. Select the WINS Configuration tab, and choose the Disable WINS Resolution option. Click the DNS configuration tab, and select Disable ONS. Go to the Bindings tab. Uncheck all the boxes. Certain ISPs might give you specific instructions for your network settings. If your ISP is one of these, you should follow their instructions.

Next, open your dial-up networking connectoid and click on the Server Types tab. Make sure that TCP/IP is enabled (and compression if you want Web pages to load faster, and don't care about Ping), and everything else is disabled (unless you have specific instructions from your ISP otherwise). This will help you connect to your ISP faster.

Tweaking your settings

There are other low-Level TCP/IP settings you can tweak. You can do this manually, but it involves getting your hands dirty with the Registry, so it's best to let some software do it for you.

There are several tools you could use, but two stand out, iSpeed (www.hms.com) and EasyMTU http://easymtu.tripod.com). Both are freeware. These programs optimise some esoteric TCP/IP settings such as MTU, MSS and RWIN. For example, MTU is the Maximum Transmittable Unit, and this setting is imperative for optimal packet transmission. If it's set correctly, it will stop information from being broken up during transfer. Windows 95 always sets this too high for modem use, as it assumes you're connected to a LAN. Windows 98 should set the correct MTU size automatically but it can get it wrong.

Note that iSpeed is really meant for Windows95--Windows 98 has a new feature called MTU Auto Discover, that automatically determines the optimal MTU (and will derive all of the other settings from that) on connect. Nevertheless, you should still make sure that P Packet Size is set to Large, as laid out in Step 1. This is because if you set the IP Packet size to something smaller than Large (Auto assumes 576, even though it shouldn't), you limit your maximum MTU because Windows assumes the setting is as high as it needs to go. Another reason is that if you set the settings manually (through the Registry, as iSpeed does), you lose Windows 98's ability to dynamically choose the optimal settings on connect as well -- and servers have been known to change these settings frequently to handle more traffic.

If you want to determine your MTU manually, here's how. Open a DOS prompt and enter this command: ping -f-1 [trial MTU number] www.[your-isp].com.

Start with a value of 548 and go up or down depending on the message (if it tells you that the packets are being fragmented, you need to go down -- you want the highest setting that doesn't cause packet fragmentation). To derive your MTU from the ping data, add 28 to the highest number that worked (packet size+28). Then, to derive your MSS from your MTU number, take MTU-40 and insert that value for MSS.

Check your Corn Port settings. First, change your FIFO settings. To do this, right click on My Computer. Go to Properties. Then click the Device Manager tab at the top. Locate Modem, double click on it, then double click your modem. Click the Connection tab and click on the Port Settings button. Now slide the FIFO buffers all the way right. If things don't work correctly when you try to use your modem, you should change this back. Go back a level and click on the Advanced button. Make sure your modem is using hardware flow control, use compression and error control for best results.

Telephone line tweaks

Sometimes when you request a second line from BT, rather than installing a totally new second line from the exchange or local cabinet, their engineers attach a special box outside your house that allows two telephone lines to share the same cables back to the exchange. This uses a technique known as DACS-2 -- Digital Access Carrier Service.

DACS is highly unsuitable for use with V.90 (and many other) modems. This is because it effectively multiplexes two phone lines down a single line. This is perfectly adequate for voice and fax communications (which BT is obliged to support) but less than optimal for modem operation, especially with V.90 modems, which rely on a direct link to the exchange, unadulterated by any further digital to analogue conversions. Sadly DACS introduces two extra digital to analogue conversions into the path from your ISP to your location. If you have DACS, at best you'll be able to get 33.6kbps out of your V.90 modem.

If you order an extra line for your modem from BT, you should specify that the line is for use with a modem, that you do not want it to be DACS-ed over your existing line, and that you want a Direct Exchange Line.

Tweaking your settings

Go back to Device Manager. Double click the Ports section, and then double click the Communication Port your modem uses. It will bring up a similar Properties section. Click the Port Settings tab. Change Bits Per Second to 115,200 or higher. Change Flow Control to 'Hardware'. Then click the Advanced... button and it will bring up the same FIFO menu as above. Slide the bar all the way to the right again.

Upgrade your modem

Many people bought 56k modems when they first came out several years ago as X2 or K56Flex, without considering the update to a standard that was bound to come. Why do it? Well, for a time most ISPs supported V.90 plus its earlier incarnations. However, that transitional period is now over, and many ISPs are dropping support for the older standards.

The bottom line is this -- if you try to access a V.90-only ISP with a K56Flex or X2 modem, the fastest connect speed you'll get is 33.6kbps. Luckily, most modems are 'flash' upgradeable to the V.90 standard. It's a simple process that takes less than 15 minutes. Check out the V.90 Upgrade FAQ at www.56K.com. This tells you all you need to know about the procedure. Make sure your ISP supports V.90 as well.

All you must do is flash your modem's BIOS with the V.90 protocol and (for best results) update your modem's INF 'drivers'.