Hey all, here's a problem for the most experienced of Networkers.
We've got a small office with five Macs running Mac OS X 10.4.2, all Software updates applied as of October 17, 2005. We've got a D-Link DI 604 Router, a D-Link DGS-1008T Gigabit Switch, and Comcast is our ISP. We have no firewalls (outside of what the Router has by default) and no virus protection.
About a month ago, our interet started having severe latency issues, similar to an internet connection without a DNS server. From the time you type in a web address, there's about a 15-20 second delay before the page begins to load. Once it goes, at least half the page loads, and then it hangs for another 15-20 seconds before completing the page. I suspect this is due to ad banners and other page content being kept on different servers. So for example, because of the huge delays prior and after a page begins to load, it can take up to a minute to pull up cnn.com, espn,com, or any other major website. Controversially, a speed test at dslreports.com shows our connection is fast and fine, and downloading a file, once the download finally begins, is full speed. Our delay is in connecting to http servers. This is true for all of our Macs here in the office.
So anyhow, I called both our ISP (Comcast) and D-Link. If we take the router out of the equation and plug a computer directly into the Cable Modem, the connection is good. So the conclusion was that our Router had gone bad. Since it was no longer under warranty, we purchased another one, which coincidentally was the same model (DI 604), only this one was the "E3" variation with firmware 3.51. Long story short, same problem existed with the new router.
Had Comcast come out and replace our cable modem, because that was the only thing that hadn't been replaced. That didn't help. However, while the Comcast tech was here, he plugged his Windows PC laptop into our DI-604 Router, and webpages pulled up fast on his computer, without delay. Ahha. So it's a Mac thing?
Thus, the problem must be between Mac OS X 10.4.2, or some Apple software update that we installed in the past month, and the D-Link DI 604 Router. Unforunately D-Link knows nothing of the sort, I can't find any other reports on the web, which leaves me with no solution to our problem. We're currently running without the DI-604 Router, and instead using the "Share Internet" option on one of our Macs, which works fine.
So, anyone have any ideas? Thanks for reading.
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