The short answer is, not much.
Explanation: The way your computer connects to the Internet when using a DW6000 or DW4020 is significantly different than it would with a non-self-hosted system like a DW4000. Instead of a direct connection to Internet servers, your computer connects through the appliance. The appliance itself maintains the connection to the external server and buffers both incoming and outgoing data. This precludes the use of the standard TCP “tweaks” that we use on other broadband connections and with the non-self hosted systems. All of those tweaks are used to improve conditions for data transmission based upon the latency and speed of the network a device is connected to. As far as your computer sees the connection, it is happening at LAN speed and latency, and therefore there is nothing to tweak. The defaults that are set up by your operating system will undoubtedly give you the best overall results, as they are already designed for LAN speed and latency. In fact, if you do attempt to employ the TCP tweaks described elsewhere in this FAQ for non-self-hosted systems, or broadband tweaks from other sites and software, you will quite likely make things worse. Perhaps much worse. The bottom line is that the only TCP parameters that matter to your Internet connection are those used by the appliance itself, and you have no control over those. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact testing shows that the TCP settings coded into these devices make them capable of speeds far in excess of what we would see on a fully tweaked non-self-hosted system. That doesn’t mean you will see such speeds. That means that even if you could tweak the thing, it likely would not go any faster.

The Browser Tweak

There is a “tweak” for your browser that can significantly increase browsing performance. This is to increase the maximum number of TCP connections per server that your browser uses above the default. This tweak is especially significant for the DW4020, but will also help with the DW6000. How you implement the tweak depends on which browser you use. What number you use depends upon which device you use.

• For the DW4020, since there is no HPEP proxy to help with browsing, we will set this value to a very high number, 64.
• For the DW6000 the number can be much lower, in fact 21 is high enough to get the maximum benefit.

For Internet Explorer users: Internet Explorer requires two new registry keys to create this “tweak”. Note that if you have used the Lan Client Configuration Utility (LCCU) provided by Hughes, it will have already made these entries. You may still want to edit the entries and increase the values used by the LCCU, particularly for the DW4020.

You will make the registry keys manually using regedit. Start => Run => (type in) regedit

Below you will find where in the registry to put the keys and what to name the keys. Navigate to the locations specified in the left pane, then in the right pane, right click and choose to create a "New" Dword value. Name them exactly as shown. Once they are there, double click on each and insert the value 15 (HEX) for the DW6000 or 40 (HEX) for the DW4020. Once you've done that, exit regedit, re-boot. Your work is done.

WinXP and Win2k: All DWORD Values

HKEY_USERS - .DEFAULT - Software - Microsoft - Windows - CurrentVersion - Internet Settings

MaxConnectionsPerServer
MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server

HKEY_CURRENT_USER - Software - Microsoft - Windows - CurrentVersion - Internet Settings

MaxConnectionsPerServer
MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server

WINME / 98: All DWORD Values

HKEY_CURRENT_USER - Software - Microsoft - Windows - CurrentVersion - Internet Settings
MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server
MaxConnectionsPerServer

For users of Mozilla, Netscape, Firebird or any other Mozilla based browser:

Open your browser and enter “about:config” as the url, without the quotes.
1. Scroll down to Network.http.max-connections. For the DW4020 make the value 128. For the DW6000 try 64
2. Go to Network.http.max-connections-per-server. For the DW4020 make the value 64. For the DW6000 use 21.
3. Go to Network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server. Make the value 8. (Increasing this value much above 8 will create problems. Be careful with this one.)
4. Exit and re-open the browser.

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by PetDude
last modified: 2005-12-11 19:35:18