ok well up intill recently i was using dial up for d/l torrent files in azureus so when i saw that it said that i had a NAT problem i just ignored it because it didnt effect my dial up speed because it was going slow enough allready . . . but now that i have switched my internet service provider to Road Runner my d/l's are going only at a max speed of 70kb/sec where when i am d/l a file off of a regular webpage it goes at the max speed of 700kb/sec . . . . i'v heard somewhere that my airport extreme may need some configuring but i havent been able to find a good walkthrough on the internet on how to fix it . . . if any one knows anything about the subject it would be much appreciated if you would help me out . . . . thanx, ed jackclark262@hotmail.com aim- hyogasaint7

Well, your download speeds are averaged speeds calculated over a specific period of time. If you are using Road Runner service, you can do a bandwidth test and it will calculate the bandwidth of your service to somewhere between 500 and 1500Kb/sec. This is because this calculation is based on the amount of time it took to download a specific file and then the numbers are extrapolated to calculate a "perfect world" scenario of your top reachable speed. Accurate by the standards of your ISP, but not applicable to your actual download speeds. Downloads (especially with Torrent, LimeWire, Aquisistion, Carracho, Hotline, or any other peer-to-peer download) are based on the speeds of all parties uploading and downloading those files. With a bandwidth of 1.5Mb on a DSL line, you can expect your average maximum throughput at any given time to be about 150Kb/sec. This goes for Cable service also. These services are shared and bandwith tends to fluctuate. DSL service fluctuates at the telephone company's CO... and Cable fluctuates based on the number of active users in-line to your particular brance of the cable service. Sufficed to say, if you are rated at 700Kb and are receiving 70Kb/sec on your downloads... that is normal. These speeds will fluctuate. This is still about 20x faster than dial-up! Probably in the middle of night your speeds will peak in the 150-160Kb/sec range when few other users are online. Now... If you really want certified speed... T1 lines or better are isolated connections on a per subscriber basis. This means that if your line is ratied for guaranteed speeds and throughput is not shared or degraded based on the number of other users online in your area. However, due to costs... this is not really feasible for a home computer setup for downloading Torrent files. From my experience, download speeds of 70Kb with BitTorrent is pretty good. Considering you are using shared Cable access... those are very good speeds.