Cable Modem: Slow Surf, Fast FTP????

[CaptRobertApril]

Hi y'awl!

I'm in the middle of butt**** nowhere for a while so I have the big choice of one ISP, a tinytown cable op. Everything is fine most of the time, but evenings and weekends the surfing speed crawls down to damn close to zero or outright stop for minutes at a time. Now I know all about the cable peak times, insufficient capacity, blah blah blah. The weirdness is that even when I can't bring up a tiny page like Google.com without waiting for five minutes, I can FTP at pretty well the same speed (30K) that I can when I can surf at warp speed. Now it would seem to me that if there is network congestion at Ma And Pa Cable Company it should affect HTTP and FTP equally. Am I wrong?

 

[calyn]

You're not wrong. Network congestion is indiscrimate about what kind of traffic is passed. So if the issue was congestion both HTTP and FTP would be equally affected (unless your ISP for some obscure reason does differentiate between FTP and HTTP).

The problem you have must therefore be something else. Have you tried ping and traceroute? Some routers also allow sending packets using specific ports to see if there is a differnce (useful whith QoS).

 

[CaptRobertApril]

Thanks for the reply. I read it and just called up the ISP's so-called Tech Support and yeah, they do have separate FTP and HTTP servers! And of course, their FTP bandwidth is almost untouched 24/7 while the HTTP chokes. The dude told me that I could route my HTTP through the FTP server by using Port 21 IN AND OUT but I don't have the slightest clue on how to do that! Wouldn't setting up a bidirection on a single port cause all sorts of hassles?

Also, there is a chance that I could diplex the connections. Get two cable modem lines and double up on speed. I don't think that a single app could get any faster, but you could definitely download on one while surfing on the other. Any ideas on the hardware/software required for diplexing?

 

[calyn]

... they do have separate FTP and HTTP servers! And of course, their FTP bandwidth is almost untouched 24/7 while the HTTP chokes....

Not what I meant. What I meant is that your ISP actually classifies HTTP and FTP traffic differently giving them separate bandwidth (that would be very unusual to say the least). If HTTP traffic to any site (also sites not hosted by your ISP) chokes and FTP does not (have you tried FTP sites hosted by another ISP?) then there is something very strange going on in that network.

You could try a public proxy on a different port than 80 (many use 8080 or 3127) and see if that speeds up the process.

The dude told me that I could route my HTTP through the FTP server by using Port 21 IN AND OUT but I don't have the slightest clue on how to do that!

The techsupporter has no idea what he's talking about. If they are separate servers you cannot connect to the FTP server on port 21 trying to get HTTP traffic from the HTTP server.

Also, there is a chance that I could diplex the connections. Get two cable modem lines and double up on speed. I don't think that a single app could get any faster, but you could definitely download on one while surfing on the other. Any ideas on the hardware/software required for diplexing?

Not all connections can be multi-linked. If you want that, you're generally looking at ethernet, DS1, DS3 although some others are multi-link capable as well. DSL and cable are generally not suitable for multi-linking. Also, you'd need a multi-link capable router with multiple interfaces of that type to multi-link.