After some trouble with my old "g" class wireless router, I went back to just directly connecting my cable modem from my ISP to my computer with an ethernet cable.

My connection problems went away, but out of curiosity, I chose to check my download speeds when there was no extra device between the computer and the cable modem. I used http://www.speedtest.net/ and checked about a dozen cities.

Imagine my amazement to see that my peak download speeds had roughly DOUBLED from before when I used the router, and my steady download speeds for large files was also about 20% better than before!

This would not be the case if I had a basic cable account that was capped at 5 Mbps or an ADSL account capped at 3 Mbps. It was only a factor with my higher bandwidth account that I've got. I'm only promised 15 Mbps according to the ISP web site, but I'm getting peak throughputs for small bursts (they call it turbo boost or something like that) of about 31.2 Mbps. That is very fast. My upload speed remains the same at about 1 Mbps max.

So, if you have a reasonably fast computer, and have upgraded to an upper level internet account that hasn't been artificially capped at some speed, you might want to do some download tests with your wireless router in the setup and without.

Fortunately, the Mac OS in OS X Snow Leopard has a very good software firewall in the "Security" system preference pane. Be sure to check the box for "stealth" mode for ultimate security. It's as good as the firewall that was in my physical router.

This makes me happy but I should have done it sooner!