The best I can get is around 20 Mbps out of Atlanta.  Definitely not the 50 I was hoping and paying for.  Several days go by of me chalking it up to Comcast’s over-hype of their ability.  A friend/coworker (Shameless plug for his website – BuildEgg) suggests the router is probably the bottleneck.  My friend’s solution to his underpowered networking hardware was to build his own router using pfSense.  Trying to explore cheaper options first I do a quick Google search and find a suggestion to disable the IPS.

Disabling the IPS and a quick reboot immediately yield results around 60 Mbps.  Woohoo.

Speed Test Results

Simply disabling the IPS feature nearly tripled my throughput.  I honestly have no idea if there are any other ramifications for doing this, but at this point I don’t care.  I’m also only getting around 4 Mbps upload speeds versus the advertised 10, but I’ll save that one for another day.  In any case I felt I can’t be the only other poor sap who’s getting horrible speeds, just because of their poorly performing router.

I briefly used iTunes in the past, but was never really impressed. I’ve consistently used Windows Media Player for quite some time now. There may have even been a brief stint with Winamp. Perhaps the only reason I stuck with WMP was it was already bundled with the PC. While helping Clay finally setup his computer this weekend, I took a peek at his music library. I’d seen CoverFlow on the iPhone, but just assumed you couldn’t use it on Windows. Guess that’s what I get for assuming.

I immediately set it up to share music. Only problem there is you can’t use CoverFlow when looking at a shared library. When I got to work I got excited thinking about all the possible libraries out there. To my shagrin I couldn’t see a single shared library. While I’m not a network expert, I’m pretty sure it’s due to the limitations of zerconf and subnets. Maybe not limitations, but intentional design.

Using RendezvousProxy I was able to at least view my home library, via a tutorial. It works perfectly when selecting individual songs, but when set to shuffle iTunes will hang at the end of the first song. I’m still hoping to be able to access shared libraries on the campus.