My 20 friends and I have a DSL network (thru linksys WAG200G router and hub switch) and the our dsl speed as per the server is 2 MB (we are paying this 2 MB speed). However, when we browse on the internet, the dsl speed is very slow and always disconnecting almost every 15 minutes and then reconnected again.
My question are:
1. Is our network already overloaded that the dsl internet speed became slow?
2. If our network is overloaded, what is the ideal dsl speed for 20 to 25 computers?
3. Or is there another solution to speed up the dsl speed?
Please give me technical advice. Thank you very much.
You know if your connection is overloaded by knowing the transfer/receive rate for your dsl connection. I doubt your router will be able to accurately convey the information (SNMP capable routers could work with mrtg to graph your connection). You could NAT the traffic through a PC and watch the transfer rate (some firewall programs (i think smoothwall had it) have built-in traffic graphing.

Is the disconnecting on your internet connection or the individual PCs?

If the individual PCs are having a hard time "talking" while other PCs are working fine, it could be an indication of your link becoming more latent or your router failing to handle the load. You might try a proxy server (squid or maybe delegate) to see if will better equalize the PCs talk time.To Wyatt: Thanks for your comments; however, they are too technical that I am  CONFUSED. How do I know the transfer/receive rate of my dsl connection? What are SNMP capable routers, mrtg, NAT and smoothwall? Anyway, like I said as per my ISP (not server), my dsl speed is 2MB and we are paying this speed. Please note that when the connected pcs were only 10, the dsl speed was fast. Do we need to upgrade to 3 MB or maybe 4 MB?

Disconnection is in the internet connection not on the individual pc. By the way, the connection of my 20 friends is Ethernet (cabled connection, CAT 5).

Could you explain further what I should do to speed-up our dsl speed? Again, thanks a lot.
Who is your Internet Service Provider and what type of package do you have with them?

Depending on your package...the additional computers you have sharing this connection will have their own IP address.  You may want to look into a static IP provided by your ISP...of course, additional cost.

Also, you may want to look into a faster connection package offered through your ISP...again...additional cost.

The more computers you have connected to the network, the slower the connection may become.  Best resolved by talking to your ISP...unless the slow connection is limited to one or two computers.  In that case...it may be another issue...and not the connection, but a problem with the computer experiencing the slower connection.Bernee,

Sorry if I tossed too much out there. The only reason I stressed knowing the Tx/Rx rates on your internet connection (bps) is to know if you are pushing a constant 2mbps through your DSL line. This will quickly let you know if you need to increase you speed package.

The reason I suggested to NAT (translate the private IPs of your LAN to the 1 public IP your router has) the traffic through another PC is so you can see the Tx/Rx rates of your connection. Smoothwall is a pre-configured OS (for use as a dedicated Internet gateway if you didn't already have a router) that may be a quick way to setup your connection to run through a spare PC (with two NICs) to determine your transfer rates. I think Smoothwall also supports traffic graphing (no need to watch it, just pull up the report). You could also accomplish this with any Windows PC using the ICS and monitoring your Internet facing NIC's utilization (with an app like Gkrellm or even the Windows task manager).

SNMP is a low-level communication PROTOCOL to get statistics from your router. It is unlikely that your linksys will support this (though I thought I saw some Cisco/Linksys SoHo routers advertise this).

The one thing that I'd really like you to clarify is the drops. You say your internet connection is dropping, is that the internet connection dropping for a few PCs or your entire internet connection (meaning the DSL modem lost its connection to your ISP and all the PCs are down)? Some congestion issues can look like a loss of Internet to a few PCs, but your Internet will still be working fine for others on the network.

If your connection is really dropping (loosing the DSL light on the modem, or dropping your authentication), you could have an access issue with your ISP (MISSED phone filter, bad/dirty phone line, problem in your ISPs network). You should be able to see how strong your DSL connection is by looking in your DSL router's web interface and looking at the DSL connection's status/statistics (where you'd see what rate you connected at - look for margin (db) (needs to be less than 60db) or signal to noise ratio (SNR) (should be >8 ).

If you connection is stable and some PCs are having issues accessing the Internet (while other work OKAY), could be 1) link over-utilization (using all 2meg), 2) link becoming more latent due to the amount of traffic on your DSL link, or 3) your router not being able to keep up with all of the traffic.

You may look to see what your ping times are to your router and to your router's gateway (use 'tracert www.google.com' in DOS and look for the 1st public IP address that isn't your router) - the ISP's router. Run pings to these IPs when your connection isn't in use to get a baseline, then re-run the tests when a PC is having troubles. Your ping times to your ISP's router should be ~20 to ~40ms. While the ping times to your router should be >1ms to 5ms. This will let you see if your link is becoming latent with the increased load from all the PCs on your network. Ping test are the best way to troubleshoot these types of issues. If your ping times are jumping up >200ms to your gateway when the LAN is under load, then the link is probably over utilized.

If that all looks good, then you may give the proxy server a try. This may help balance the 20 PCs "talk time" to the Internet. Squid is the best, but needs a unix/linux PCs (not sure if there is a Windows port or not). Delegate is an okay windows proxy - put I'm not sure how well it'd handle that may PCs. Your friends may not like a proxy as all their web traffic has to be sent through a single PC (where you could watch it). The proxy server's have options to cache content so that everyone isn't re-downloading the same google image every time the homepage is opened (it will be stored on the proxy and re-sent to everyone requesting the page and you can adjust the aging on the cache) which could also help the issue.

Good luck, God speed.