4 Tips To Speed Up Your Safaricom Unlimited Internet
Earlier this year, Safaricom introduced weekly and monthly unlimited data plans, I made a review of the Weekly unlimited plan here. This move by Safaricom was aimed at bringing affordable Internet access home. Although many residents in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu, where Safaricom 3G Signal is stronger will be more than satisfied with the 128k speeds, many others living in 3G challenged areas might find it frustrating to browse or download with the throttled unlimited package.
I have been blogging for the past three months using the unlimited package and satisfied with the 30-100k speeds am getting, and that’s where all the fun ends. For downloading large files such as music and movies, I would not rely on the 128k speeds being offered by Safaricom; place two or three parallel downloads and you know what I mean.
Nuff said, you can increase your Safaricom unlimited Internet speeds on your modem by following these tips:
- Scan for viruses, adware or spyware on your computer. Once these uninvited intruders find a home in your computer, they will always remain hungry for your precious bandwidth. Use a good antivirus software such as Kaspersky or Mcafee to scan and clean your computer. If you are a heavy Internet user, it’s advisable to use Internet Security editions of your favorite antivirus to keep your computer protected from being hijacked by malicious botnets.
- Reduce image quality on webpages. Although all browsers are different, you can easily configure whether to load images or not from Tools, Preferences, Appearance. In addition to stepping up your loading speeds, lowering image quality reduces your data consumption.
- Close all idle programs. Close all programs running in the background that you do not need. It’s also advisable to close all tabs that you are finished with. Having numerous processes running in the background while browsing or downloading means more consumption of CPU and RAM resources. The CPU is snappier if dedicated to one duty as opposed to crunching data for parallel tasks, you will notice webpages loading faster when you close your idle background apps.
- Install a firewall application such as Comodo and configure it to block unwanted apps from connecting to the Internet. However, be careful not to block applications blindly. For example, I block all software updater apps as well as the windows update service while online and unblock them later when am done with browsing. It’s not complicated as it sounds, Comodo Firewall shows you a list of apps that are actively connected to the Internet so you can easily handpick which ones to block.
Rumours that hacking your Safaricom modem will give you wings to browse faster is not true. Hacking your modem will also not make you browse free. As a matter of fact, hacking your modem might be illegal according to most internet service providers’ legal policies, including Safaricom.
When buying your modem, know what speeds its limited to. The default modem speeds determines your web experience. In the past, Safaricom offered the Huawei E160 which offered a maximum of 3.6 Mbps, then the E1750 with 7.2 Mbps, and now there is an even faster Huawei E1820 Modem which clocks 21Mbps. Choose your modem wisely and apply my four tips for an even faster browsing 
