Slow Internet Speeds with AirPort Connection and Firewall Enabled

A former Apple employee offers verification of a problem causing slow Internet speeds with broadband connections through routed through AirPort base stations when a Firewall is enabled.

"After speaking directly with Apple's technical support, including an Apple product specialist, there seems to be a potential software glitch with Mac OS X v10.2.1 when people enable their OS X Firewall and are using AirPort (Graphite and Snow base stations appear to be affected). People connected to broadband (cable, DSL, etc.) may experience slow connectivity after a reboot if they are using the OS X 10.2 Firewall."

"The problem is as follows: when the 10.2 Firewall is enabled, a broadband Internet connection can become randomly slow after a reboot (the problem is intermittent), dropping down to speeds slower than 56 K. Using the 'permissions repair' feature of Disk Utility seems to temporarily alleviate the problem, but it will return after successive reboots."

Chris G. tested the problem on an iBook and a Power Mac G4 Desktop, yielding the following results:

"After personally experiencing this problem for about a week (shortly after installing 10.2.1 and the latest 2.1.1 AirPort software updates), I reinstalled 10.2 from scratch, then ran all the updates using software update, which went fine.

"However, after a few reboots, the problem surfaced yet again, as I had to run the permissions repair and then reboot my Power Mac to bring my net connection back up to its 3 Mbps speed. Note that the problem was further isolated to the firewall as my iBook (connected to the same AirPort network), would download and identical file from an identical location at speeds 50x faster than my G4 (which is directly underneath my base station, the iBook is about 50 feet away). I do not use the firewall on my iBook, and since my troubleshooting work have disabled the firewall feature on my G4 system and have not experienced the slow connectivity problems since doing so."

An Apple discussion thread contains more than 100 posts regarding the issue.

Feedback or workaround possibilities for this issue? E-mail late-breakers@macfixit.com

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