Brief Hands-On Report--Apple Released Broadband Tuner 1.0 Updater for Mac OS X 10.4.x
About Broadband Tuner
The Broadband Tuner allows you to take full advantage of very high speed Internet connections that have a high latency (5 Mbps or greater). The installer tweaks some system parameters.
There is an optional uninstaller that can be used to restore the settings that were in effect at the time just before the system parameters were changed.
What does the Broadband Tuner do exactly?
The installer increases the default values for the size of the TCP send and receive buffers. With larger buffers more data can be in transit at once. A startup configuration file is also updated so that these changes will persist across restarts.
The system parameters are sysctl variables that are set as follows:
net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072
net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000
This change has a system wide effect and is applied even if the network is not high speed connection with a high latency, with the exception of modem connections for which the system uses small default TCP buffer sizes.
We downloaded Broadband Tuner 1.0 and installed it on our 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4 with no problems. We are currently using a hotel high speed internet connection from STSN (iBahn). Before installing Broadband Tuner 1.0, we got an average of 1.71Mbps download speed for four tests from this Web page. After installing Broadband Tuner 1.0 we got an average of 2.24Mbps for four runs. However, the Read Me states that it is for faster internet connections, 5Mbps or more. So far, we've encountered no problems. [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]
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