Optimizing Your Cable Modem: Hacks for Better Internet Performance

When his cable modem service seemed to slow almost to a crawl last spring, Matthew Hallacy did like most people and complained to technical support at his Internet service provider, AT&T Broadband. But after the sluggish performance persisted for weeks, . . . When his cable modem service seemed to slow almost to a crawl last spring, Matthew Hallacy did like most people and complained to technical support at his Internet service provider, AT&T Broadband. But after the sluggish performance persisted for weeks, Hallacy, a Minnesota-based software engineer and networking expert, decided to take matters into his own hands: he hacked his cable modem.

"Tech support told me it wasn't their fault and the service was going as fast as it could. So I downloaded the specs for the modem off the Web and started poking around to see if that was true," said Hallacy. It wasn't long before Hallacy, 21, devised a trick for modifying an obscure configuration file used by the service to control the settings in his 3Com cable modem.

A few tweaks later, Hallacy's $50-per-month service, which had been downloading data at a poky 75 kilobits per second (Kbps), was sweetly humming along at much brisker speeds in both directions.

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