In most cases, you’ll notice a considerably speed increase. The solution is simply to plug your Mac in using a cable if you’re close enough to the router. Anyone that lives in an apartment with lots of neighbours will be familiar with the poor performance that WiFi sometimes gives. 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. Surprisingly, many people don’t realise that using an Ethernet cable can be much faster than WiFi. Use Network Utility to measure ping times and see other useful information 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. You could also open the Network Utility (located in Applications -> Utilities) and conduct a “ping test”, but sites such as already measure the ping times – which is the network time to reach a specific host such as .uk. Use sites such as to check your connection speed For example 6 Mbps, 20 Mbps, or even more. 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.Īnother 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. 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. The first step is to test your Internet speed.

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