[Pegasus]

A friend of mine, who lives in Australia, has a very peculiar problem. She just recently purchased one of the new Macbook Pros (her first Mac) to replace her dead Windows lappy and for whatever strange reason it seems to kill off the internet connection for everybody else in the house but for her Mac. So I figured, since some of you folk are more tech-savvy, that you might have an idea what the cause may be. Here's what she told me:

Quote

...everytime I download something on the Mac, it kills the internet (except for the download). I can't browse sites, unless I refresh a billion times and it'll timeout at any moment. No one else can use the internet on other computers either. I don't get it. The download speeds are very good though! But... it's a nuisance and I'm not sure how to fix it. I know downloading causes slowdown, but this much is insane.

Her household uses a Dynalink RTA1025W router and her ISP is Netspace, with ADSL broadband Speed: 512k/128k. She also told me that they've never experienced anything like it before with this service. It all sounds quite strange to me, so any help would be much appreciated.

[Pegasus]

So... no ideas? Anyone?

[Eric5h5]

No clues here. (But that's nothing new!)

--Eric

[bobbob]

Usually I'd suggest installing DD-WRT or Tomato on the router for pretty much every reason, but this looks like some special hardware.

If she's using wireless, maybe try using wired connections all around. A hidden node problem might cause the Mac to think the wireless is clear and start broadcasting, drowning everything else out, so this would rule that out. WDS also wastes about half the bandwidth, so making sure that's turned off if possible would be a good idea. What else? Oh, turn off ethernet bridging. Usually that is pretty much broken unless there's only one device being bridged. If it's in B/G/N mixed mode,then maybe set it to one mode.

I also remember some cheap routers crashing if they encounter UPnP. They often have problems with NAT and a large number of connections, too.

[Lowry]

Hi from Adelaide,

Got same problem with Mac Pro and Open 624 adsl modem.
The net just drops, a reboot seems to fix.

[Thain Esh Kelch]

Problems like this are usually the routers fault. I would suggest that you update it using the latest firmware available for it, or otherwise, replace it.

I had a friend, where if I connected to the LAN with my MBP, and signed online on MSN, then we lost all internet connections. Signing on AIM, Jabber, etc. worked just fine. Also, if he was downloading torrents, all machines other then his own lost their internet connection.. So weird.. When he replaced the router, everyone were happy. ^_^

[Pegasus]

Thanks. I'll relay that to my friend.

[ikir]

Probably a router problem. MBP download faster than the old wind notebook so it goes crazy. Sometime bad router do these things when there is high traffic in your network.

I suggest to update the router, or try another one, or try your MBP in another network.

[UmarOMC1]

Thain Esh Kelch, on May 29th 2009, 03:27 AM, said:

Problems like this are usually the routers fault. I would suggest that you update it using the latest firmware available for it, or otherwise, replace it.

This is the answer I was looking for (the most correct one)-I second this post, 100% correct.