Speed Daemons

The thing that most plagues multiplayer gamers isn't our video cards, our processors, or even our RAM. Yes, it's our old arch-nemesis, bandwidth. While half of the people on any multiplayer server will yammer on about getting a cable modem or DSL, for many of us $40 a month, plus hardware costs just isn't feasible. Alternately, we are stuck on a normal modem, on often questionable phone line connections, and ISPs that are sporadic at best, while those on the servers outrun you, and taunt you beyond sanity.

Enter the 3Com/USRobotics Internet Gaming Modem. A modem that claims to speed up your gaming speeds and ping times. But how can a normal modem actually "lower your ping times". After all, it's going through the same phone lines, and the same ISPs that you got your bad pings on, and it's still limited to a maximum of 53k. So how on earth could it really do anything special?