How to get Faster Internet speed when you change a simple setting
When it comes to internet speed, there is a big difference between functional and working. Most of us simply connect our modem and router to our ISP and open a website. If it loads, then we assume our internet is good to go. While technically that is correct, our connection is indeed working, but it is not optimized.
In order to optimize your connection, there are some basic simple steps you can take so that you can ensure that you get the best internet connection and fastest speed from your ISP. We do that by optimizing our MTU – The Maximum Transmission Unit.
What is MTU?
In order to understand the MTU let’s look at a real-life situation: Grocery shopping.
After a trip to the supermarket, your car is full of the items you just purchased which all need to be carried inside the house. There are two ways to bring in all the groceries:
Option 1: carry each item individually
Option 2: put multiple items inside a bag and carry the bag inside.
Most of us prefer to make fewer trips to and from the car, so a lot of items in a carrier bag is faster and more efficient. The only thing we need to worry about is not overloading a bag as too many items in a bag result in items falling out so it requires another trip to the car.
This is how our computers work too.
Bits of data are sent and received and together they make up whatever it is we are doing online. What we want is to instruct our computers not to make those repeated trips to the car to get each item one at a time; those take longer which results in slower speed. We want our computers to put all the data in one bag which is far more optimized for speed.
This is where MTU comes in. We need to firstly work out what is the maximum MTU size our computer can handle before dropping data our of the bag. Once we know that we then set that “bag size” or MTU.
Step 1: How do you find the right MTU size for you?
In order to find out what is the maximum transmission unit (ie our data bag) that our computer can handle, we are going to use the PING command. This is a simple command that basically sends out a message to a website saying “hey Website are you there?” and the website replies with “yes here is my IP address.”
We are going to do use that method and either one of these two things will happen:
- We will get a message back from the website which means we found the biggest MTU
- Or we will get a message back with Data Fragmented which means – woops we put too much data in our bag so we will try a smaller PING until it works.
Step 2: How to set the MTU size.
Now that we have the right MTU size that your system can handle, the next step is to actually tell the system to use it.
Ideally, you should set this in your router so that everything on your network can use this MTU. Some routers don’t have this facility you will need to set it on each computer on your network.
For both these steps and the commands you need, check this out:
If you don’t want to go through these steps, check out How to optimize your Windows 10 with Voosh and then you can optimize your PS4 internet speed to get faster gaming and how to use a Powerline Adaptor to get faster wifi in your home!
