Hardware bottleneck?

[iron2000]

Just learned that my cable modem is bottlenecking my surfing speed and it made me think about the other networking hardware.

Does the router affect surfing speed?
I've heard that different routers support different maximum simultaneous connections and it affects Bittorrent downloads, is that true?
If I have 3 PCs on wired and 1 on wireless-B, does it do good to all stations if it is changed to G?

For ethernet cables, is it that the longer the slower or slower when beyond a certain length?

Current hardware set-up:
-Cable internet plan (12Mbps down/384Kbps up)
-Motorola SB3100 cable modem
-Netgear WGR614v1 router
-Compex WLU11A wireless USB adapter

[ErikD]

The cable modem shouldn't be a bottleneck per say, it is really the plan you have with your ISP. If you pay for 12Mbps down then that is what you will get as a max. Cable is a shared media, so everyone in your area using it will degrade your performance some. So if everyone on your node is doing heavy downloading then you will get less. Nothing that you can do will help this.

Now the wired router is running at 100Mbps. Your internet is running at 10Mbps (to make things simple). You can transfer 10x faster on the LAN than the WAN, so if just doing internet then it won't be a problem. Now if you have more than one PC on your network they will all share that internet bandwidth. So it is totally possible that one PC will monopolize the connection (say one doing your torrents).

[YeOldeStonecat]

The 3100, granted it's an older model, but it's not your bottleneck..it's rated for 38 megs throughput.
http://broadband.motorola.com/consumers ... _Sheet.pdf

You might not get some advanced features such as bursting (Ex....Comcast PowerBoost)...but it's not a bottleneck.

Yes...lower grade routers cannot perform as well with many concurrent connections...something that P2P software relies on heavily, so most consumer grade routers crumble under the loads of P2P traffic.