How is dsl affected?

Answer 1

A number of factors can affect your bandwidth.

• The distance between your home and the ISP central office. The DSL signal has to travel over copper phone lines and can degrade at long distances, preventing your DSL connection from operating at its maximum possible speed.
• The number of users sharing your DSL connection. Many users in your neighborhood will generally share a connection from the DSL central office to a fiber internet backbone. At peak hours during the day, you will all be sharing that line and you can see your bandwidth decrease on average. This is probably the number-one biggest cause of a slowdown.
• Any additional hops beyond the DSL modem. If you have a router (wireless or otherwise) that share your DSL connection with multiple users, then your available bandwidth will be shared between those computers/users. Try password-protecting your wireless LAN and decreasing the number of hops between your device and the DSL router.
• Naturally, any bandwidth caps that your ISP might impose. Your ISP will often offer tiered service plans to its users to encourage them to pay more for more bandwidth.
• And finally, any other internet applications that might be running on your device will also share your bandwidth, say, if you were streaming music or using a BitTorrent client in the background when trying to stream video online.

You can properly test your bandwidth by heading on over to speedtest.net and running a test. Try doing this several times and during off-peak and peak traffic hours for where you live and you'll see a huge difference in your speeds.