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broadband speed problem

Hikkadwa

Hikkadwa

macrumors member
Original poster
May 14, 2005
73
0
wild west wales uk
own a mac intel 2ghz. Have a wireless Belkin 54G router. Just upgraded from 2mb to 8mb speed with btbroadband however the spped is poor generally about 1.2mb. BT tell me my line is fine and that it must be a problem with either my Belkin being unable to cope with *mb speed or the firewall on my Mac. At the moment I don't have one but BT tell me the machine will have one built in? not really sure if they're trying to have one over on me, any suggestions???
 
Hikkadwa said:
own a mac intel 2ghz. Have a wireless Belkin 54G router. Just upgraded from 2mb to 8mb speed with btbroadband however the spped is poor generally about 1.2mb. BT tell me my line is fine and that it must be a problem with either my Belkin being unable to cope with *mb speed or the firewall on my Mac. At the moment I don't have one but BT tell me the machine will have one built in? not really sure if they're trying to have one over on me, any suggestions???
Click to expand...

Where are you getting the 1.2mb reading from?

As for the Firewall, there is the built-in one on Mac OS X, also there will be one on your router
 
Sounds like the standard issue response: "Oh it must be something to do with your Mac" (because we don't know anything about them).

The Firewall settings can be found under Apple menu > System Preferences > Sharing > Firewall but AFAIK it wouldn't be having any significant effect on your broadband speed and is nothing to do with it.

It's possible that it's your router, it might be a "b" wireless device (is it old or was it really cheap?) only capable of 11 Mb/s (which is about the speed you're getting - 8Mb=1MB - if my calculations are correct, which they might not be..) as opposed to a "g" (54Mb/s) or "super-g" (108Mb/s). Airport Extreme will only go at "g" speed (54Mb/s=6.75MB/s).

Or it could well be them and they're just fobbing you off with techno-babble in the hope that you'll assume it's your problem and go away.
 
Hikkadwa said:
own a mac intel 2ghz. Have a wireless Belkin 54G router. Just upgraded from 2mb to 8mb speed with btbroadband however the spped is poor generally about 1.2mb. BT tell me my line is fine and that it must be a problem with either my Belkin being unable to cope with *mb speed or the firewall on my Mac. At the moment I don't have one but BT tell me the machine will have one built in? not really sure if they're trying to have one over on me, any suggestions???
Click to expand...

Your computer comes with a firewall built into osx - under system preferences > sharing > firewall - it's probably off by default, but check. Personally, I leave mine on all the time, and it's never seemed to affect my broadband speed.
 
Hikkadwa said:
own a mac intel 2ghz. Have a wireless Belkin 54G router. Just upgraded from 2mb to 8mb speed with btbroadband however the spped is poor generally about 1.2mb. BT tell me my line is fine and that it must be a problem with either my Belkin being unable to cope with *mb speed or the firewall on my Mac. At the moment I don't have one but BT tell me the machine will have one built in? not really sure if they're trying to have one over on me, any suggestions???
Click to expand...

How did you measure the data rate?

One way to figure ths out is to eliminate the Belkin router. Connect the mac directly to the cable or DSL modem. If the data rate then go up to spec you have found the problem.

It could very likely be that whatever computer you are connecting to at the far end will not sed you data faster then what you see.. Perhaps it connects to the Internet using a T1 line. 1.2MBPS would be about right.

Also, note the the 8Mb spec quoted toyuou is the _peak_ data rate. You will not be able to see 8Mbps averaged over a long period
 
The other thing to note of course is that 8mb is the 'ideal speed', but that it will often be lower depending on how far you are from the exchange, and how many other people are online at the same time in your area (you share your broadband allocation at the exchange with up to 50 other households).

However, I'm not sure that all modems support broadband signals in excess of 2mb, so you might wanna check the belkin website for specs.
 
Be sure that you are not getting Megabytes mixed up with Megabits

An 8 Megabit connection is able to download at around 1 Megabyte/second

This is why I was wondering where you where reading the speed from
 
you lucky devil for getting 8mb (maybe) outta BT , i'm stuck at 1mb :(

BT normaly fob me off and then maybe cut me off every time i phone up and complain about speed issues.

rest assured it's not Mac OS firewall thats the issue , nor i would doubt it to be your Belkin router either - try rebooting your BT modem
 
Also remember that you're on a shared node so your speeds may vary throughout the day depending on the amount of traffic on your part of the network. It's likely to be more crowded in the evening time than early on in the morning, mid-day, and super late at night.
 
Thank you

many thanks for all your suggestions. However still a very slow speed. Latest trest as instructed by someone in India was to plug direct into Bt socket at point of entry eliminating all other extensions, lines. Result no difference. Belkin tell me it cannot be their router.
 
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