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EchohcE

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 25, 2008
14
0
I got a brand-new 2.5ghz 15" MBP with a 320gb 7200rpm hard drive and 4gb of RAM exactly a month ago. I'm using it to hook up to a wireless network with cable internet. For some reason, I can only get a maximum download speed of 40KB/s with this incredible machine! I don't think it's the laptop itself, because at my friend(the mac user who converted me)'s house, it got a download speed of 750KB/s. Both speed tests were done at www.speedtest.net . There must be some way to improve my dowload speeds on this laptop...it takes ten hours to download 1gb! Can anyone help me?
 
Very strange.

My MBP can sustain DL speeds well in excess of 3-5 MEGABYTES per second on my campus wireless network. I don't know of any settings on the MBP that you could tweak to help this out -- I would guess the problem lies in the wireless router that you have. What brand? I would suggest plugging the MBP directly into the cable modem via ethernet and giving the speedtest a try again. That way you can eliminate your MBP as the issue. There could be settings in the router that limit throughput to some clients? I'm not sure, but I would guess that the MBP is not the issue.

--mAc
 
What sort of specifications is your wireless router?
802.11 a/b/g or n? single or dual channel?

On your mac, goto

/ Applications / Utilities / Network Utility.app

Here you can see what's your connect.
 
I tested it both wirelessly and connected via ethernet to the wireless router. My router is a Motorola SBG900, and I recieved marginally better download speeds and much faster page load speeds with the ethernet cable than I did wirelessly. I took a look at the Network Utility, Network Interface (en1), and it says my Wireless Network Adapter is (802.11 a/b/g/n). It says the Link Speed is 54 Mbits/second. On my Network Interface(en0), it says the Ethernet link speed is 100Mbits/second. I tested both on www.speedtest.net and only recieved 2-3 KB/s difference with the ethernet to the good.
 
A lot of things determine what kind of download speed you get. Things like the number of devices connected to your network and the available bandwidth of both your router and broadband connection. Some more information about your setup would be helpful in determining a fix. What kind of wireless network do you have? (b/g/n?) What kind of broadband do you have and what is its bandwidth? (DSL/Cable/Fibre?)
 
I tested it both wirelessly and connected via ethernet to the wireless router. My router is a Motorola SBG900, and I recieved marginally better download speeds and much faster page load speeds with the ethernet cable than I did wirelessly. I took a look at the Network Utility, Network Interface (en1), and it says my Wireless Network Adapter is (802.11 a/b/g/n). It says the Link Speed is 54 Mbits/second. On my Network Interface(en0), it says the Ethernet link speed is 100Mbits/second. I tested both on www.speedtest.net and only recieved 2-3 KB/s difference with the ethernet to the good.

To me it looks like that may be the limit of you broadband or you have reached your bandwidth limit on your router. did you try connecting directly to your modem through ethernet? that should tell you which is the bottleneck
 
To me it looks like that may be the limit of you broadband or you have reached your bandwidth limit on your router. did you try connecting directly to your modem through ethernet? that should tell you which is the bottleneck

I just posted the results of connecting directly to my router with an ethernet cable. Those were the results. I use Cablelynx, so I'm guessing it's a cable connection. I don't know how to find out exactly which kind of wireless network I have, and I don't know how to check the router's max bandwidth.
 
I just posted the results of connecting directly to my router with an ethernet cable. Those were the results. I use Cablelynx, so I'm guessing it's a cable connection. I don't know how to find out exactly which kind of wireless network I have, and I don't know how to check the router's max bandwidth.

Did you connect directly to the cable modem with ethernet (not the router) and see what the speedtest says?
 
The cable modem doubles as the router. It just occurred to me that I should mention that I'm using the latest release of Firefox with pipelining enabled, and the maxrequests set to 8.
 
The cable modem doubles as the router. It just occurred to me that I should mention that I'm using the latest release of Firefox with pipelining enabled, and the maxrequests set to 8.

Ok. try the speedtest using safari and see if there is a difference, of not i would say that the problem is the bandwidth of you current cable provider.
 
I just posted the results of connecting directly to my router with an ethernet cable. Those were the results. I use Cablelynx, so I'm guessing it's a cable connection. I don't know how to find out exactly which kind of wireless network I have, and I don't know how to check the router's max bandwidth.


It could be that your connection has a contention ratio of something stupid like 50:1. This means your connection is shared between a maximum of 49 other families before it comes to your home and on this night, everyone is using the internet at the same it.
 
It's been like this since I got the computer.

Same exact problem here, I just got 13" MBP i7, 4GB and it's download speeds never exceed 40KB/sec while my 2007 IBM T61P downloads 150KB/sec,
Truly upsetting, whats the fix??
 
Same exact problem here, I just got 13" MBP i7, 4GB and it's download speeds never exceed 40KB/sec while my 2007 IBM T61P downloads 150KB/sec,
Truly upsetting, whats the fix??

There appears to be performance issues with the 2011 MBPs and some routers/APs using 2.4Ghz frequencies (802.11g/n).

See https://discussions.apple.com/message/13185947

I have a NETGEAR DGN3500 running on 802.11n, and it just absolutely sucked with the new 2011 MBP.

When I switched off its WiFi, and instead started using 5Ghz 802.11n AirPort Extreme, my problems went away and I get the full 450Mbit speeds.

However, when I go outside with this laptop, it's a roll of the dice whether the wireless works at a coffee shop :(

Probably a firmware thing of some sort.
 
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