Would anyone be able to give me a hand with getting my modem/router setup working properly?

Your ISP may be throttling torrent traffic. Happens a lot.

Um, you may have to choose a port for your torrent app to use and then forward on your router by using the firmware configuration app.

What torrent program are you using?

Oh oh, this sounds a lot like a problem i’ve only had recently with torrents. When I was operating off a cable modem I would run bitorrent in the background, and as long as I wasn’t dl’ing a serious list of stuff, it never affected me. But I’m on a wireless internet setup now, a little more limiting I know, but I usually have to choose if I want to run bitorrent, or access the internet. Regardless of if I pause ALL dl’s or even only have a total of 0.5 kbps (including uploads) running through bittorrent, it will hog 90% or more of the connection and reserve it for itself. Don’t know what’s going on in the background there.

I agree with Jamspoon. Get your ports working correctly and the speed should increase. @ Dave, ISPs usually just send you a warning if you’re not cloaking your traffic, don’t they? They won’t try and discourage you by slowing your connection.

Thanks to everyone for the rapid responses. I don’t think the connection is being cloaked/throttled or whatever because torrents used to work when I was connecting directly to the modem. I did think I needed to do something with the ports, but it all seemed very complicated when I looked at it. The moded is a Siemens Speedstream 4200 (really shit), the router is a Netgear… something and I’m trying to use either utorrent, transmission or vuze (on a mac). All seem to encounter NAT problems, and I’m not sure whether I should do that UPnP thing, or forward ports on the modem, or forward them on the router, or all of the above, or none =P Any suggestions?

I used to use transmission, but I have a long-time love for µtorrent. The only problem I’ve run into is, since they’ve released a newer beta version for mac, my connections sometimes tend to just drop and I have to restart the program. If you do use µtorrent, make sure to enable outgoing encryption. This will make it so that your ISP can’t see what you’re sending and receiving, and you won’t get a nasty letter telling you to knock it off. You can turn it on by going to µtorrent (On your Navbar at the top of the screen) > Preferences > BitTorrent > Outgoing Encryption: Enable.

If you don’t want to go through a bunch of stuff u could do the easy way and put the internet cord from your modem to router to modem to your computer. Sometimes that works.