Connection speeds

Every time I connect to the Internet with windows XP it displays the speed in the bottom right corner. When I was on 56k it would usually say that I was connected at 53.2 kbs- (is this a good speed for 56k?) when I got DSL (with verizon) I got 3 different speeds depending on connection and times---- the eathernet cable (from the modem to the eathernet card) would sometimes get 10 mbps and sometimes 100 mbps--- the USB cable would always get 12 mbps---- whenever I run speed tests on broadbandreports.com- it would always be around 730 kbps.
Why does Windows XP tell me I have 10 12 and 100 mbps when the speed tests with broadbandreports.com are the same?
Is there anyway to improve connection speed and improve online game performance?

 

53Kb with dial up is better than good. It's about the fastest I've ever heard of. 50Kb is usually the absolute maximum for that connection.

As to the broadband part - it sounds pretty reasonable and if you only have one PC hooked to it, no problems.

The network card in your PC if it's reasonably new (past couple of years) is almost certainly able to run at 100Mbps. There may be a minor cable issue or possibly some issue with the modem that slows it down to 10Mbps at times but it isn't worth doing anything about because the limiting factor is your connection speed to the internet. Your network card will always run faster than the internet part so it isn't any sort of bottleneck.

You can get (and pay for) various connection speeds but for a home user, about the fastest any of us could afford would be 1Mbps and normally not even that. Cable usually a little faster than DSL but unless you have a really unusual ISP, the speeds you are seeing are above average. And from the numbers you gave, about 35 times faster than your dial-up was.

If sometime in the future you decide to have more than one PC at home with all having internet connections thru the one broadband modem, the network speed (network card to modem) will need a little work. Probably about 2 minutes to set the network card to run at 100Mbps full-duplex. But it won't speed your internet up by even a smidgen so not worth the effort right now.