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Hi all, just passing along my experience - your mileage may vary. I think its worth submitting since I was able to double both my UP and DOWN test speeds with these small changes. These observations were made with an ASUS AC-3100 Router, from a hardwired 8p 24 gig (mem) server with a 1 gig Ethernet card. Firewall off I understand this is religious, but I set the devices to protect themselves as best I can. After all, I had no firewall rules in place anyway. So the firewall was just kind of a big piece of code in the router that had to do work on the packets - slowing the router down significantly. IMO that protection can be done elsewhere for much less expense in speed. Again, broad stroke firewall (even with no rules set) does protect against certain attacks - so turning it of is a choice I gamble on since I'm not the department of defense and nobody is trying to prove anything by screwing me over. AND, my server firewall does the same stuff regarding DoS attacks and what not. ( all these fear factors we live with ) NAT Acceleration (cut through) on NAT is a confusing thing to investigate. Devices, L3 switches, routers all have settings. I'm still reading about it. However for today, I can tell you that NAT acceleration ON allows a bunch of stuff to bypass the processor in the router and it makes a HUGE difference in Download speed. Turning it on or off did not make any difference in Upload speed. DNS Settings Talking about DNS settings arrives at a discussion of DHCP settings. That is because DHCP does you the kind favor of loading up the address of it's favorite DNS values when you do not tell it otherwise. This is the setting that allowed me to get from about 5Mbps Upload to 20Mbps Upload instantly. I was initially using the ISPs DNS server, and had my router set to allow DHCP pass through so my devices were becoming contaminated with the ISPs DNS address. This is a tricky topic but it makes a big difference. Consult your manuals carefully. Bottom line, do what is needed to get a good DNS server working for you. --john

in april 2016 and again november 2016, twcable maxx and charter customers may have noticed their isp server being over provisioned. IMHO this is a marketing gimmick to allow you to "speedtest" 15-20% faster - but at an unstable high latency speed. if your router's quality of service is disabled, and you are now seeing wired speedtests on your 50/5(60/6) service at 70/6 (or double this on double speed 100/10 tiers) I would strongly recommend you enable QoS and set it closer to 60/6 (about 15-20% below peek speedtest). this will lower the speedtest reads, but it will also lower your Latency back down to where it should be. lower latency during peek bursts of speed will benefit twitch gamers and lower the error re-transmission rate needed by bulk down-loaders. if you can't enable your QoS, but use a torrent or download client, you may want to at least cap the download rate within these clients 20% below your top speedtest.