Internet Connectivity – How To Test Your Router

If you are thinking of or already have some kind of Internet connectivity at home or office, you need to also check how your broadband router is functioning. Take the scenario of you trying to decide what kind of Internet connectivity solution you should go in for. In this “pre-connectivity” phase, you also need to know whether your broadband router is capable of supporting specific technologies and how you can go about enhancing the performance of the same. Enter the highly effective Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool.

How To Test Your Router

What you need to be aware of

When you use this Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool, you need to have the correct operating system. The operating system that is conducive for this tool is:

• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• Windows 7 but this sometimes returns a patchy result

What are the technologies that you can check out

This tool is essentially meant for checking out home based Internet connectivity. Broadly speaking, it is capable of checking out technologies such as:

• TCP window scaling
• NAT and
• ECN

TCP window scaling

TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol. TCP window scaling is a technology where the size of the window, which is normally limited to a maximum of 65,535 bytes can be scaled up. This scaling is done by deploying a specific type of handshake and can enhance the dataflow value to 1 GB. Therefore, if your broadband router supports this kind of TCP window scaling then you can enjoy better performance.

NAT

NAT stands for Network Address Translation. This technology works on IP or Internet protocol network. It enhances broadband performance or Internet connectivity by changing the way IP data packets move across a particular network or on a particular traffic route. In fact, without getting too technical about the way this technology works, NAT is capable of integrating multiple private IP addresses into one IP address that can be given to you by your Internet service provider. So, if you have multiple computers sharing a single Internet connection and are different entities on a home network, you can simplify the management of the same.

ECN

Explicit Congestion Notification can work in conjunction with IP or TCP. The simplest way in which this technology works is by bringing down latency issues. Sometimes, a TCP connection may let a few data packets fall through the cracks. ECN reduces the occurrence of this incident.

Thus, using an internet connectivity evaluation tool can have several benefits for your home internet connection.