Low Network Utilization

Windows XP Media Center SP3 32-bit
Toshiba Satellite A105 S4084
Intel Pentium M T2050 1.6 GHz Dual Core
4GB PC4300 DDR-SDRAM (3GB usable)

I have access to both wired and wireless connections in a new apartment in Bolivia. My machine will establish a connection to both without issue, but my browser (Opera 11.61) reports very low transfer rates. I'm not sure if Opera's idea of "speed" refers to bandwith, throughput, etc., but suffice it to say, browsing (and everything else) has slowed to a crawl, and this on a connection where other users don't seem to be having any issues. What's more, task manager's 'Networking' tab reports no more than 1% network utilization on either connection... then again I have no idea if that's something out of the ordinary or completely normal.

Wireless Router:

54M Wireless Router
Model No. TL-WR340G/TL-WR340GD
Firmware Version: 4.5.4 Build 100316 Rel.59606n
Hardware Version: WR340G v5 0815311C

ADSL Modem:

unknown. lives somewhere in the building outside of this apartment. During pings to the device's default gateway, Wireshark records the identity of the destination device as Intel_17, nothing more. being unable to get a make/model#, and having already tried every default user/pass combo I can think of to no avail, I can't access the device via 192.168.x.x to reset it or look into possible causes/fixes.

I downloaded Bandwith Monitor (www.bwmonitor.com) to try to determine whether the speeds I'm experiencing are normal for the connection. After being up for about 15 minutes, the program has reported a max of 752.8 kbps, an average down speed of about 200-300kbps and an average up speed scarcely above the single digits. At no point has Opera reported transfer rates of anything above 6KBps, a far cry from the 35-40KBps that the connection should be able to achieve, given Bandwith Monitor's readout.

Ready to provide any and all additional information upon request. Thanks kindly in advance.

-newmy51

 

Speedtest.net?

Try a different web browser?

 

Speedtests were attempted on my machine. What looked to me to be very poor results were mirrored almost identically on another machine on the same connection, so the connection is simply this slow... for everyone. Thanks, Bolivia.

My remaining trouble lies in being unable to access gmail in anything but HTML mode, which is not so much a networking issue as a browser issue. Having downloaded the latest Firefox which successfully loads gmail (albeit slowly), I'm off to the Opera forums to hunt for whatever browser settings might be choking the client out of a successful connection.

Lock away. Another thread for the dustbin of MajorGeeks history.

Thanks for the advice.

-newmy51

 

You may be better to try with a popper type software. It might suffice until the connex is fixed.