For your ADSL connection you might be faced with 2 possiblities of connecting.

You might, or might not have a provider which supports both a PPPOE or a PPPOA connection, not all providers supports both, and not all providers will give you the username and password for your connection thereby not giving you the possibility of choosing your own equipment.

Communication through PPPOE is done in software, whereas PPPOA is done in hardware.

That means your router would have specific chips inside of it specifically constructed for PPPOA connection and operation.

Basically this means that some of the latency in your network might come from the software run PPPOE.

And if you also have a router which you set as bridge, in addition to another box/router behind the bridge making the PPPOE connection, this will also add extra latency.

You might not notice much of this if you are just doing downloads through HTTP streams.

But if you are doing alot of VOIP (voice over ip) either through the SIP protocol or with Skype, you might notice network bursts and such as stutters or static on the line, this is because the bridge uses alot of CPU and memory to handle the bridging, aswell as any latency added by the station behind the bridge also speaking PPPOE.

There could be other reasons aswell, such as congested lines on your provider or various other things which are not usually under your control short of changing ISP(internet service provider.) Or perhaps changing the provider of your internet telephony solution, but the scope of this article is targeted at your connection, and what choices will and can take your own equipment out of the equation when trying to pinpoint the fault of communication glitches.

Connections problems specified before are especially true if you do have a router/bridge/modem which are from the usual suspects Zyxel/Dlink/SMC etc.

These are usually products only suitable for the home user, and should not be used generally by more than 3-5 people at the same time.

However these suppliers also have some hardware which are quite good.

But people are always looking for a good bargain, and dont usually choose the product that is best suited for themselves, and their Internet connection future.

The choice of connection equipment and communication protocols could be vital to your small or medium business.

I know there are many small business owners that bought cheap equipment and spend much of their day pulling out powercables, and then putting the cables back. This in order to restart their product, all because they thought they were smart, and wanted to save a few bucks.

This is especially true here in Phuket.