concerned with speed of Airport Extreme

[josephcamp107]

Hey everyone. I am a college student and I love movies, so I like to download torrents and stream free movies from sites such as letmewatchthis.com. I live in a dorm facility so I have to rely on shared internet bandwidth that thousands are sharing.

I just bought the Airport Extreme base station because I wanted faster downloading and internet speeds. The current speed my ethernet internet access can achieve on a good day is 250 kb/s, and a slow day is 40-70 kb/s. I connected and properly set up the Airport Extreme today and immediately wanted to see if it increased the download speed. I began to download a torrent and, sadly enough, the speed had not increased and, in fact, stayed in the same range, never getting CLOSE to the mb/s speed promised by the Airport Extreme. All of my connections are right. Our dorm rooms have a built in ethernet line with two ethernet ports, so I had one ethernet cord running from that to the Airport Extreme's WAN port, and another ethernet cord running from one of the ethernet ports on the Airport Extreme to my Macbook Pro. I tried all other variations of connecting, but the speed did not increase.

I am wondering why the speed did not increase? Do I need to buy a modem so that I don't have to rely on SHARED internet access and bandwidth, or is it something I am not aware of? Bare in mind that I am not savvy when it comes to this area of expertise and knowledge...

Thanks a lot: )

 

[TopHatPlus]

hey

input = output, your airport extreme is capable of speeds in excess of 50 mb/s but if you only have 250 kb/s input thats what you get out. I have a maximum of 14 mb/s at my place and when i get a few people on the network i am lucky to get 1 mb/s. If you have shared internet in a dorm then that is your issue.

 

[alust2013]

The airport will not give you a faster speed than you get through the wired connection, as that is all the faster its connection is. Basically with a dorm, you're stuck with what you've got. Your airport is working fine, but if you don't have the bandwidth, it's just not there. Also is not a good idea to download illegally in a dorm. They monitor that stuff.

 

[vant]

A router can't magically increase the speed you are getting out of your ISP.

A router just distributes bandwidth.

 

[DeusInvictus7]

A router can't magically increase the speed you are getting out of your ISP.

A router just distributes bandwidth.

I'm surprised at how many people do not realize this.

Again: A router does not provide the speed for your internet, the provider does. Whatever they are giving to that building/room, that's what you get.

Now if it was for inter-network filesharing, like transferring a movie from one computer to another on the same wireless network, then something like the Airport Extreme will have huge speed increases.

 

[miles01110]

Also the rate at which a torrent downloads also depends on the number of seeders and how much they are seeding.

There's nothing you can do about it, basically. You're probably being throttled by your IT department anyways.

 

[ryanparanich]

duuuuuur

hey

input = output, your airport extreme is capable of speeds in excess of 50 mb/s but if you only have 250 kb/s input thats what you get out. I have a maximum of 14 mb/s at my place and when i get a few people on the network i am lucky to get 1 mb/s. If you have shared internet in a dorm then that is your issue.

Only capable of 50 millibits per second hey? Wow, what a ****** machine.

CAPS MATTER. Stay in school kids.

Gigga Mega Kilo bits/Bytes milli centi

"MacRumors - We entertain some of the stupidest people on earth!"