larinia: > ehm, thank you all very much, I will try to connect my laptop directly > with the modem and see if there is any difference. You need another cable (or a rather intelligent nic or modem;) for this. > Does half duplex make the network traffic slower? It does. But as I already said, this should not matter in your situation, because that bridge (or modem or whatever) will be the bottleneck. Therefore, simply leave it as it is.