Download Speeds slow on Mac, not on PC, Parallels or Bootcamp?

I recently switch from DSL to Cable because they offered higher speeds. I don't know if this affected DSL before because they only offered up to 2.5Mbps, the cable internet I'm on now is a 7Mbps/1Mbps line.
For the life of me, I cannot figure what is happening with my configurations. I have 2 PCs at home, a intel imac, and a macbook. When I run speedtests on dslreports or when I download large files from microsoft/apple, I get great speeds on my PCs. Around 880KB/s down. However, when I try to do the exact same thing on OSX, I get speeds around 260KB/s and it seems to be capped there.
The strange thing is that when I run parallels or boot camp, and try the exact downloads or speedtests I get the correct 7Mbps that I'm supposed to get. Am I doing something wrong with my configurations on OSX? It doesn't make sense that I can download in a window on OSX running paralles and get the fast speeds but thru OSX I cannot?
Both OS's are running Firefox. I've tried Safari and Camino on OSX and get the same results. I'm guessing its not a hardware problem because winxp on parallels and bootcamp get great speeds. This affects both my iMac and macbook. Any help would be appreciated

I have a 24megabit ADSL+2 connection and I had the same trouble as you.
When using Ubuntu or windows xp in parallels I had maximum uploads and downloads. But this was not the case in OSX.
My ftp uploads in osx were like 45k yet in ubuntu the were 120k to the same server.
I tried all sorts of methods to fix the problem.
But it turned out my problem was the router, I had a thompson/alcatel router a recent model.
I tried a cheap netgear adsl2+ router and bingo all my problems went away. I now have the same speeds in OSX and XP and Ubuntu.

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    ========
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