said by Xtort :

That's false. 100 Mbit routers or switches are capable of supporting up to 12.5 MB/s of bandwidth, the same that Nitro provides. Most are only going to get 80% of that, so roughly 80 Mbit or 10 MB/s. You don't need a gigabit router for this service.

said by stolen :

Technically, no you don't need a gigabit router. But try getting good speeds even locally to your own computers connected to a dlink or linksys consumer router, and it's much less than 100mbit. (I used to see around 5 or 6 MB/s) .
So if you actually want to see good speeds on nitro out to the internet, and your using a hardware firewall with only 100mbit ports, you're going to need something better.

said by Xtort :

I'm not all of that fan of Tom's reviews and also those reviews are 3 years old. Router quality and features have increased tremendously over that time frame.

Now there are simple things that I do to ensure that I get faster throughput:

1. Uninstall QoS Packet Scheduler
2. Use GPEdit to remove the QoS bandwidth restriction.
3. Disable QoS in the router.
4. Full-duplex network connection, not half-duplex.

Vista also sucks for network speeds which in turn makes people think they need to update their network hardware. I use to get slow speeds on Vista based computers before they were downgraded to XP or upgraded to Windows 7.

I have numerous 10/100 switches in my office that range from supercheap SmartLink to more SoHo grade Linksys and I can always get 10-12 MB/s (Megabytes, not Megabits!). The same goes for the stuff at home. Doesn't matter if the CAT5e cable is 5 feet or 25 feet long.

I'm not the only one out there that can testify to the same thing. Simply put, it's either how the networking hardware is set up, O/S limitations, or Shaw can't provide what you are expecting.