I am connected to the Internet using DSL. I have the 1.5Mbps speed. When my teenage kids are home, they tend to stream videos. One son will watch TV episodes on his MacBook. The other one will often be on Wii streaming Netflix videos. When they're both on, my web surfing slows way down. Today, I couldn't even get the UPS website nor the Fedex website to come up. (Yes, I'm conducting business here.) Will bumping up to the 3.0Mbps service make a significant difference? It's $10 more per month and I might be willing to go that route if it will help enough. If it's just going to make it a little faster, it's probably not worth it. (I'm thinking that two people streaming at the same time may be too much for even 3.0 to help me.)

Here's our setup. We're using an Airport Extreme base station with a SpeedStream DSL modem. Everyone is using wireless, whether it's the Airport cards in the MacBooks or the Wii streaming or the XBox on Live.

Up until now, i've been kicking the kids off the streaming when I need to do work on the Net.

Any opinions?

keep kicking them off.

Ive got 6 mpbs down DSL, 3 users = crawl.

Dont suppose you have cable in your area? That would fix it =)

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

Yeah, I have cable available but I don't have cable set up at my house. (Yep, I've never had cable TV at my house.)

You can have cable internet without cable TV.

I regularly got 30 down/1.5 up with my Comcast net.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

look at earthlink to get a good deal on cable internet without tv.

3.0 mbps should be plenty for the usage that you describe.

you might try this, which will prioritize traffic. (web before tv!)

[www.amazon.com]

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Yea, I would either switch to cable or try something that will either prioritize traffic or limit bandwidth to specific clients. Upgrading to the 3Mbps will likely result in a similar experience for you as the streaming sites will go up a notch in quality and suck up the newly available bandwidth.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2010 07:08PM by Gareth.

Switching to cable would cost an additional $25/month minimum (at least after their stupid intro rate) and might not help much if at all.

You need a smarter router with QoS (Quality of Service) capability (or one of those broadband boosters might work too).