Eircom Broadband Painfully Slow On My iMac

John Sheehy

I use an iMac G5 20"

Anyway, I had Eircom down home in Tralee. It was wireless. The router had one antenna... er... yeah. I think it was an NWG model, Netopia. If it helps we got it before Eircom upgraded the line connection from 1 meg to 2 meg. Anyway, it worked fine, internet browsing was fast, XBOX Live was fine and when properly configured LEGAL torrents worked fine, usually 200ks with a well seeded file.

Anyways... I moved up to Cork to work and we had terrible broadband in the house - Chorus. LOL. So I ordered Eircom broadband again.

I got this router: a different one to before.

So I set it up, forwarded ports and all that. But it's painfully slow. For example, that picture of the router above this paragraph was a 10k file. To load the page from the google link took 7-10 seconds. Torrents rarely hit anything over 150ks and even if they do they fall straight back down to 20ks and fluctuate between the two speeds. Browsing is painfully slow.

Now here's the thing that gets me, XBOX Live flies, also through a wireless connection. I download demos at a reasonable speed (can't give an accurate number) and playing Gears online rarely lags and if it does I suspect it's more to do with the server than my connection.

Does anyone have any ideas how to speed up the broadband on my iMac?

I am on an Eircom line, 2meg connection and in Cork city, Bishopstown if that helps!

John Sheehy

Ok, after a bit of searching I got this.

Enter 4.2.2.2 as another DNS server in the network properties screen. Amazingly this seemingly retarded address worked wonders. For the time being at least.