Cable-Modem question

[shocky123]

So I recently moved into a new appartment way off campus. And have therefore lost my 500Mbit connection. Along with it's glorious(at times) latency.

So here's the real problem... I know cable-connections arent anywhere near as fast as an ethernet connection, but I also know that my ping/latency to the world shouldnt be hovering in the 200-300's. But you cannot say no to a free cable internet connection when you're a college student.
But this connection is horridly slow. I can download 200-300-500KB/s on occassion but only after a solid delay before actually making the connection to start the download.
My pings are on the order of 200-500 always on whatever games I *attempt* to play online. And worse yet, the situation at hand has made it practically impossible to work from home via an ssh console.. it's just too damn slow, even typing I have lag before seeing the keys. (I had none of this while on the ethernet on campus)
So as far as I can tell, here's how I'm hooked up:
Plug into wall from computer... then off to one switch/hub that I can ping, but beyond that I'm unsure. We dont have a cable modem/router in our appartment, it's likely somewhere else in the appartment building, connected to several hubs/switches before it gets to each room.
I realize things will slow down when there is that much traffic trying to be pushed through one or two routers.

Suggestions??

(I was thinking that I might be able to 'bypass' all of those switches/hubs by purchasing a cable-modem/router, and plugging it into a cable jack, then using that as a hub for the 3 rooms in my appartment, any idea if this may work for me? I guess this is the real question at hand..)

Thanks in advance,

~Kyle

[Bires]

Sounds like the cable modem is your only salvation from your high latency, assuming that you can do it.

[Fas-ligand]

I'd be curious to know if the cable modem method works. In the meantime, test your line speed at a place like DSL reports. You don't have to have a DSL line to test BTW. See if your connection is stable all the time or to what extent it is fluctuating.

[Jeffbx]

If they're splitting the signal among that many people, the issue could very well be LOCAL latency. Too many people on a crappy infrastructure will load up a network like crazy.

Try this - when you're at school, do a pathping from an XP machine to a few different common sites that you can ping, like say, yahoo.com, dslreports.com, www.gotapex.com, etc. Collect the results in a text file, and then do the same thing from home.

Pathping is a handy (XP only) tool that will do a tracert & ping each hop. When you compare the results, this can give you a good indication of where the slowdown may be occurring. If you're not sure how to interpret them, post the results here & we'll all have a look.

Also, for SURE you want to get yourself a good firewall - if you're all sharing the same internet connection, then you're all on the same LAN. It's a pretty easy task to break into an unsecured machine on the LAN.

However, even worse is the ability to sniff the traffic - I'm afraid there's nothing you can do about that unless you want to spring for a separate connection. Most vulnerable is your email password, which is sent in clear text even if your mail is encrypted.

As for plugging a different router into the cable jack - I say give it a try. If you can isolate yourself from the rest of the network there, it will probably solve at least a portion of the speed issues you're seeing, and will certainly be more secure.