Bid to find the truth about broadband preformance

ISP watchers SamKnows.com have launched a bid to discover the truth about the state of UK broadband by recruiting volunteers to install a monitoring device on their network, to collect reams of independent performance data.

They are aiming to attract 200 volunteers who'll be sent a free tweaked Linksys router (a WRT54GL) that will measure and report download speeds for HTTP and non-HTTP traffic, latency, packet loss, DNS response, and website loading times.

It comes as there is a sharp increase in consumer anger against ISPs over blatenty misleading marketing campaigns, opaque traffic management policies and low investment in infrastructure.

I have signed up, so wait to hear.

Tomato Firmware installed on my WRT54G

Well I took the plunge and just installed it - will report as I discover any benefits/bugs.

I am hoping it will improve the reliability of my wireless connection to my XBox/XBMC setup, it's been a bit flaky lately.

Speeding up the NSLU2

In my home network I have a small NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution consisting of a Linksys NSLU2 (Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives) and a number of attached external USB hard disks.

The NSLU2 or "SLUG" as it is often called runs Linux, as per the terms of the GNU General Public License Linksys were required to release their source code. Due to the availability of this code and the relatively low cost of the device, there are several community projects centered around it. Including a number of replacement firmware images available for the device. I have been tempted to use Unslung which is based on the official Linksys firmware with some improvements and features added, but have been wary about bricking it.

Despite it running the official firmware it has proved a reliable device and the attached drives are full of my music and video collection. However it has never been the speediest device, sometimes being sluggish(sic) to transfer across the network and the web-interface sometimes being painful slow to respond.

The device has two USB 2.0 ports for connecting hard disks and uses an ARM-compatible Intel XScale IXP420 CPU. The device includes 32 MB of SDRAM, and 8 MB of Flash memory. It also has a 100 megabit Ethernet network connection.

I have discovered that models manufactured prior to around April 2006, Linksys had, for an unknown reason, under-clocked the processor to 133MHz, though a simple hardware modification to remove this restriction is possible. Later models (circa. May 2006) are clocked at the rated speed of 266MHz.

Today I took the plunge and opened up the unit and removed the appropriate resistor. Full details on this page.



I can confirm that the device is indeed much speedier and responsive. Maybe I might just get around to trying out Unslung and installing Tomato firmware on my WRT54G.