I have a problem. I have had AT&T Broadband for about 6 monthes now. Up until recently, I was using a Netgear 4 port hub to share my connection with the computers in my house. Then, I switched to a Linksys 4 port router with a firewall. I was getting 1800kps on dslreports seed test. With the firewall, now I am getting 2000kps. However, when I had the hub, I was getting fantastic P2P software speeds. Around 200kps. Since I switched to the router, I am getting no more than 20kps on the same files I downloaded with the hub. Direct downloads are fine, it is just P2P that is affected. Can anyone offer any advice?

Routers and firewalls are a bottleneck in every network. You can guarantee that as soon as you introduce a router and/or firewall into your network, your network throughput will drop. Think about it. Each and every packet you send through your router/firewall now has to be scrutinised thoroughly before being passed to the Internet. With a hub, this is not the case. However the drops you are seeing are quite signficant and, as such, I might look at the following: 1. Speed/duplex settings of the workstations to the router. If supported go for 100 full. 2. Check the router/firewall CPU and memory usage the next time you are running your p2p downloads. If they get too high the router WILL begin to drop packets. 3. Check the configured MTU packet size on the router. If it's not configured for the optimum Ethernet frame size (1500 bits), the router will have to keep fragmenting the packets it receives. This can be a lot of overhead within the router. Can't think of anything else right now. Let us know how you get on.