Secret tips to get the most out of your ADSL and fibre line from South Africa’s top ADSL experts

It’s only human nature to want to squeeze every last piece of value out of your purchases.

ADSL and fibre lines are no exception, and no matter how fast your connection is, it never seems to be fast enough.

That’s why we asked South Africa’s top ADSL experts how they get the most out of their ADSL lines.

Joe Botha from Octotel believes that the biggest problem may lie in your router:

“If you have a high speed Fibre link, 100Mbps+, then invest in a good broadband router with 5Ghz WiFi. Often the free router you get from your ISP is not great for performance and WiFi coverage.”

Alternatively, Lauire Fialkov of CyberSmart believes there may be other bottlenecks in your system.

“If you have an asymmetrical line and you are saturating your upload bandwidth, it will more than halve your download speed. So in asymmetrical environment you need to watch out for this.”

“Your router’s processor is a bottleneck, so if your router is running hot it will affect the speed of your processor”

If you are running a MikroTik, the default buffer is small, and Fialkov recommends that you set this to “ethernet-default”.

“Wireless introduces latency unless there is zero interference, so always use a cable to guarantee the lowest latency possible.”

“Locally, if you are on a Telkom fibre line, there is going to be latency to get to the exchange and from the exchange to the ISP that may not be there on another provider.”