Faster Tethered Internet

July 9, 2008 3:58 AM

My cable company is taking their sweet time setting up my internet so I'm in a new house in a new place without anything but a tethered 2g net connection. I'm on AT&T's Edge network and it's just ridiculously slow. How can I make this faster?

I'm using mobile versions of sites whenever possible, and using Adblock plus and flashblock Firefox add-ons to help cut some of the drek, but I'm sure there are probably other ways to make this process speedier. Any suggestions from the MiFi community?

posted by Gideon to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I've had good luck with onspeed. Its basically a compressed proxy and definitly squeezes the most out of slower connections
posted by rus at 4:15 AM on July 9, 2008

It's going to be pretty slow no matter what you do, thanks to the high latency.

You might try some sort of local caching proxy, although your browser should be doing a decent enough job of that on its own.

Turn pipelining is on (in about:config), so that Fx will reuse connections to get more content from the same server rather than opening new connections all the time. Opening a new connection takes a long time when 3 round trips is over a second. You might set the maxrequests pipelining option to something higher than the default of four.

If it breaks some websites, turn it back off. It used to, hence it not being on by default.

Also, disable any applications that use the network in the background and only do one thing at a time. Or, alternatively, set several new tabs to loading before you start reading a longish page. Fill your mind with hatred for the sites that have two paragraphs on each page so they can shove more ads at you.

Basically, the problem is that while the top speed of the connection is around 200kbps (not that bad), the latency is so high your requests take a long time to get to their destination, which makes it seem slow, even though it's not really all that slow in transfer rate.
posted by wierdo at 4:16 AM on July 9, 2008

Oh, a couple of other things. If you have a PDA plan, you can use the access point isp.cingular with the login [e-mail] instead of the usual wap.cingular and [e-mail]. That will cause at&t's transparent compressing proxy to be used. It'll reduce image size and bit depth, among other things, to cut down on the amount to be transferred.

Firefox will already tell websites to please use compression if they are capable of it, so the text is already shrunk.

I'm just speculating, but enabling the preference network.dns.disableIPv6 (if you're using Firefox 3) may also reduce page load times slightly, since checking for an AAAA record may be taking some time.
posted by wierdo at 4:23 AM on July 9, 2008

wierdo has it exactly right. There is a high latency on EDGE connections, so when you are loading webpages with lots of images and other content, you'll see a mind numbingly slow connection. However if you just download one single HTTP stream, you'll notice better speeds reaching near the 200Kb/s (or 25KB/s). If you don't need them, disable the loading of images in your browser, close iTunes or other programs that download podcasts/updates in the background. If you're using a MEdiaNet plan, do not use isp.cingular.com as your connection, use wap.cingular.com (using isp.*** is a surefire way to be caught tethering on a plan not provisioned for it). Only use isp.cingulargprs.com if you are on a PDA data plan.
posted by cgomez at 6:59 AM on July 9, 2008

Do yo uhave 3g in your area? Is your phone capable of it?
posted by majortom1981 at 7:15 AM on July 9, 2008

I'd look into a cantenna and see if I could briefly leach off a neighbor's wifi. Some folks have reported pretty good range- up to a couple of miles with some of the fancier setups.
posted by jenkinsEar at 8:29 AM on July 9, 2008 [1 favorite]