The Internet is your Mac’s gateway to the rest of the world, and having a speedy connection is vital if you want to download movies, make video calls, play games, or even work online. Sometimes though, your Internet access might seem like it’s in serious need of a speed boost – but what can you do to ensure the fastest experience? Even the highest speed connection may need some fine-tuning and optimisation to live up to its potential. It’s also worth noting that you should keep your Mac up to date with the latest software updates, because network-related fixes are issued from time to time. The most important thing to remember is that your Internet speed can never exceed the maximum speed provided by your Internet Service Provider. So, if you’ve only paid for a 2 Mbps Internet line, don’t expect to be able to achieve 20 Mbps! This guide explains some of the common (and not so common) ways to ensure that the Internet on your Mac is lightning fast. The speed of downloads on your Mac is dependent on a number of different things. The type of Internet connection you have is one of them. If you have a dial-up connection, it is. Test Your Internet Speed The first step is to test your Internet speed. There are various ways to do this, but the easiest (and most fun) is to use one of the popular speed test websites such as. This will test your Internet speed in the uplink and downlink directions, and present some useful statistics that you can compare with the average for your Internet provider. Another way to check the speed provided by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) is to look in your modem or router configuration, as it will often display the actual connected line speed which indicates the maximum that you should be able achieve on the DSL line and with your subscription. For example 6 Mbps, 20 Mbps, or even more. Use sites such as SpeedTest.net to check your connection speed You could also open the Network Utility (located in Applications -> Utilities) and conduct a “ping test”, but sites such as speedtest.net already measure the ping times – which is the network time to reach a specific host such as google.co.uk. Normal ping times should be only tens of milliseconds, and if you consistently see several hundred milliseconds in your ping times then it could be indicative of a Mac or a network problem. Use Network Utility to measure ping times and see other useful information 1. Use an Ethernet Cable Instead of WiFi Surprisingly, many people don’t realise that using an Ethernet cable can be much faster than WiFi. The reason is that WiFi rarely achieves the speeds that a cable can due to signal loss, congestion and attenuation, not to mention the proliferation of WiFi hotspots configured to use the same radio frequencies, which inevitably causes the available bandwidth to decrease massively. Anyone that lives in an apartment with lots of neighbours will be familiar with the poor performance that WiFi sometimes gives.
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September 2018
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