Speeding up Internet

[MDH]

I'm looking to speed up my internet. I'm an Australian running ADSL 2+ at around 4 megabits per second. I have a fairly new modern and a CAT5 cable running to my computer. Are there any other factors that could speed up my internet? Is the line running from the street to my house likely to slow down my internet if its old. Would old firmware on the modern slow down the internet?

Thanks.

[vanished]

The limiting factor is what your ISP is providing to you.  If you want it to be faster, you need to pay them more unfortunately.  Even so, being in Australia, there's probably an upper limit to what they will offer that may still not be up to your desired speed.

[ddswh1pk0s]

Nothing really you can do. ADSL speeds vary greatly depending on how far you are to the exchange. Only long term solution is to wait until NBN is in your area then you can have 100Mbps download speeds

[MDH]

37 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

The limiting factor is what your ISP is providing to you.  If you want it to be faster, you need to pay them more unfortunately.  Even so, being in Australia, there's probably an upper limit to what they will offer that may still not be up to your desired speed.

Does it cost them any more to increase customers speeds? Why don't they do it for everyone?

[vanished]

2 minutes ago, MDH said:

Does it cost them any more to increase customers speeds? Why don't they do it for everyone?

ah, you've just stumbled onto one of the biggest endless topics of discussion surrounding tech; ISPs, and their behaviour/business practices.  You will soon learn that the prevailing opinion is that they are all Satan, and some countries (Australia being one) are particularly unlucky in this regard.

[MDH]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

ah, you've just stumbled onto one of the biggest endless topics of discussion surrounding tech; ISPs, and their behaviour/business practices.  You will soon learn that the prevailing opinion is that they are all Satan, and some countries (Australia being one) are particularly unlucky in this regard.

Right, so do you know if it costs the ISP's any more money to increase their customers internet speeds?

[vanished]

Just now, MDH said:

Right, so do you know if it costs the ISP's any more money to increase their customers internet speeds?

Well in truth they only have so much bandwidth that they can dish out, as a result of whatever infrastructure they've built.  So if they had just one customer, they could offer that person 10% of their total possible speed or 100% and it would cost them the same.  It's just that when serving hundreds or thousands of people, they can only give each person so much speed and still have enough left over for the rest, and thus it effectively becomes a bidding war to see who will pay for more bandwidth.

 

To resolve this, the companies should continue to build more advanced infrastructure so that they can offer higher speeds, but usually they just sit around collecting massive sums of cash for doing nothing and (here at least) spend it on stadiums and things like that to advertise.

[Donut417]

6 minutes ago, MDH said:

Does it cost them any more to increase customers speeds? Why don't they do it for everyone?

Its called proffit. Depending on the infrastructure the ISP has depends on how good the service is. For example in the US ATT and Verzion have allowed their copper lines on the poles to rot, they just dont give a fuck about them any more. This is due to the fact they can easily offer LTE with low caps and high overages. Another example is Comcast testing Docsis 3.1 service. This will allow them to offer gigabit internet on Coax. Im sure there is a cost to upgrading to this capablity. Which is why the highest profit area's will get it first. Also, DSL is shit, its a dead standard. In the US most of the time DSL cant even be marketed as broadband because the FCC states you need a minimum of 25Mbps to be considered broadband. Most ISP's want profit above all else. They dont care about customer satisfaction. 

Watch this it explains every thing.

[vanished]

And then there's Telstra:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=telstra+cables&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiassC094DNAhVXPVIKHaDmCQgQ_AUIBygB&biw=1920&bih=965

[Donut417]

2 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

And then there's Telstra:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=telstra+cables&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiassC094DNAhVXPVIKHaDmCQgQ_AUIBygB&biw=1920&bih=965

That goes along with the ATT and Verizon examples I gave. Whats sad about those pictures is Coax still has a place in the modern internet. With new Docsis standards they can still remain some what competitive. However I have seen stuff like this from Comcast. Lucky for us we live in a good area, they maintain their shit around here.