Apple devices hogging wifi/internet bandwidth?

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COOKEE

5 posts

Wannabe Geek

#215244 18-Jun-2017 21:10

Hi all, a chance conversation with my daughter yesterday had us realise we are both having this issue. We each have a teen in the family with a Macbook Air, and whenever said teens are streaming videos in particular, the internet for everyone else (Windows) slows to an absolute crawl. Doing an initial search there's quite a bit on the web about this issue with, as usual, many suggestions and ideas.

Wanting to know if anyone here has encountered or experiencing this and more importantly was a working solution found? I am Technical but this troubleshooting is outside the scope of what I normally do (apart from having only rudimentary Mac OS experience) so rather than reinvent the wheel, I know there's some bright sparks around who may point me in the right direction. And it does not seem to be isolated to just MacBook Air but also iPhones and iPads. We can't be alone with this issue?

Our setup is Fibre 30/10 with Spark using (their) Huawei HG 659b Router.

Speed increase to 100 is an obvious option but that really only deals with the symptom, not necessarily the cause and if there are things I should check or rule out it would be great to start with that.

TIA :-)

Aredwood

3885 posts

Uber Geek

#1803138 18-Jun-2017 22:57

Are the Windows computers connected by Ethernet cables or Wifi? If Wifi, try connecting with Ethernet instead and see if it fixes the problem.

lNomNoml

1808 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

#1803142 18-Jun-2017 23:06

If the PCs share the WiFi with the Apple MacBook then simply get better WiFi equipment such as a dedicated WiFi access point, as the available bandwidth is being used up.

If the PCs are connected via network cable then upgrade your Fibre speed.

nedkelly

659 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#1803179 19-Jun-2017 08:22

I run Mac devices at home with heaps of Windows devices and I dont see this happen (Even on ADSL 2) though I do run Gargoyle with some basic QOS setup for download.

sbiddle

30853 posts

Uber Geek

Retired Mod

Trusted

Biddle Corp

Lifetime subscriber

#1803184 19-Jun-2017 08:43

How many wireless devices do you have connected? What is the signal strength like on all of them?

My pick would be that you're simply saturating your wireless.

Dairyxox

1594 posts

Uber Geek

#1803191 19-Jun-2017 09:12

-Does it happen the entire time the Macbook Air is being used, or its it patchy/intermittent?

-What type of internet do you have? xDSL, Fibre, Cable, Fixed Wireless...etc.

-Are you using 2.4ghz WiFi or 5ghz.

-Is the 2.4ghz frequency overloaded at your home?

-What router are you using?

It could possibly be iCloud hammering the upload bandwidth syncing photos etc. Might be as easy as changing the iCloud sync options.

I've got a Macbook Air, ipads iphones, samsung tablets & phones, hp laptops, windows desktops etc..Never seen this happen.

For troubleshooting purposes it may be a good idea to see if it is WAN traffic that is affected, or LAN traffic. I.e when you notice the issue, try and copy a file over the LAN, to see if it is affected too.