Does The Ethernet Network Card Used Effect DSL Speed

Q: Do Ethernet cards have any effect on ADSL Internet speed?

A: The simple is no, your Ethernet card does not effect the speed of the connection between the DLS modem and your Internet service provider (ISP). There is also very little chance that your DLS speed is after than your Ethernet network card.

So lets get a little more specific and figure out if you can get a little more out of your Internet connection. The normal or average speed of a DSL connection is 1.5 Mbps but they can go much faster. For example my DSL connection is 6.0 Mbps.

Ethernet network cards come in 3 main speeds, 10/100/1000 Mbps. All of these are faster than the average DSL connection so your Ethernet card is probably not slowing you down.

If you have a really old network card, a 10 Mbps card, and it does not have a full duplex mode, that is sending and receiving of data at the same time, then your experience could be better than it is. What this means is if you are sending data, uploading an MP3 file, and you are downloading at the same time, your Ethernet network card has to do one or the other, it cannot do both. So by switching to a card that supports full duplexing you can see better performance.

Also, most modern date Ethernet cards now support technology that allows the data to go from the Ethernet network card directly to your hard drive without going though the CPU. Again most modern computers do this so that helps to speed things up because then downloading items wont actually use up your processor and it allows you to do other things.

I hope you have found this helpful beyond the basic answer that your Ethernet network card is probably considerably faster than your DSL connection but there are some technologies out there that do help a little here and there.