[Langdon]

I recently moved into a new apartment that provides free cable and broadband. The problem is that the speeds I am getting from their network are painfully slow. Pages time out when I try to load them in Safari and during the day its almost impossible to connect to sites that other friends in the same area (a couple blocks away) have no problem getting.
I assume that I am not the only one in my building with this problem but they don't have any tech support in the building so I am still waiting (its been a week) for someone to call me back from their office.
I know it might be a long shot but is there a way to tell if they are capping the speeds to each apartment inorder to accomplish something? I know they are blocking certain ports on their router because all P2P programs with the exception of bittorrent fail to connect to the outside world so could their attempts to restrict traffic also be hurting our other open ports? If anyone has any advice as to how I can do some troubleshooting from here I would appreciate it.

Thanks!

[Krusty]

Maybe they're capping the speeds ... maybe they are just sharing a single connection amongst multiple apartments. All it takes is a coupla people doing some bandwidth sucking actvity (online games, whatever) to hog up the bandwidth.

Here's a few ideas:
Applicatons/Utilities/Network Utility. Choose the "Netstat" button --> Display Routing table info -- it'll show you how many people are actively sharing your network. Lots of other good tools in Network Utility as well.

http://www.dslreports.com/stest/ This is a speed test site. Check your speed at different times of day. If it goes really fast at say 4:00 in the morning but slow during the day, this is again a sign of just having too many people sucking bandwidth at once.

http://www.whatismyip.com/ ... shows the external connection to the internet. If its not the same as your IP Network Preferences then you are sharing bandwidth with other people.

[ghporter]

I don't think it's as much a "speed cap" as it is that the management is trying to share ONE cable connection among all the apartments. Sure, a single cable connection can get you some pretty fast speeds, but if you're sharing it with a dozen or so of your closest friends, it gets bogged down.

With cable TV, you can split and amplify the signal, and everybody gets decent quality. NOT with cable Internet...

My take is that your apartment complex's management is trying to pull a fast one with their "free broadband" offer.