Why are My iTunes Downloads so Slow?

Question

I have a 30 Mbps internet connection.  When I run a speed test against my connection I almost always hit 30 Mbps.  However, when I download podcasts and other files from iTunes my download speeds max out at just over 7 Mbps.  I ran the diagnostics in iTunes and everything checked out fine.  Any ideas on why I getting such a slow download speed?

Answer 1

Same experience here with anything being downloaded from Apple! For at least the last 5-6 months we have gone from very fast down loads from Apple Software Update Servers which were humming at around a Megabyte to 1.5 MB a second for the better part of the last DECADE! Which was fantastic and essential for upgrading dozens of computers on the many networks we manage. Now every single network for the last 5-6 months is only getting fractions of theses throughputs. Down to 30-80 KBs (Per Machine) which is a nightmare. It makes no difference geographically in Sydney  or which Service provider. We have called the service providers and they have tested the pipe to Apples servers and they get the same results. We were comfortably getting 1GB downloads with in 20-40 minutes per machine with up to 5 or six machines on an ADSL 2+ connection at a time... easily, now its taking 3-4 hours to get a gigabyte per machine with only 2 or 3 computers at a time.
Its a nightmare and yes we use an in-house OSX Servers SUS and down load the big updates and distribute them internally but there are now so many different updates required for different machines its difficult to do this and we just upgraded 2 computers to Lion and they wanted to down load over 2.5GB in updates each with out the system software updates which we had previously downloaded. SUS on each computer was indicating just under 24 hours to down load 2.5 GB from Apple. We were able to down load this with in an hour previously.
Its become a nightmare harking back to the performance we were getting from the internet in the Nineties. It is suspected that since Apple removed their mirrors from around the world we all have to go to the States to get our Software, iOs and iTunes updates and Apples growth is impacting on their ability so serve up the bandwidth with everybody downloading ridiculously large 3.5 GB Lion installers.
Interestingly Microsoft servers are dishing up the same poor bandwidth performance as Apple yet Google is the same its always been at around 800-1MB a second and many other big companies blow the Apple servers out of the water on the same networks.
Something has to be done about this as our clients are beginning to complain seriously about it as its costing significantly more to run an Apple Network.
And no one from Apple wants to talk about it. And this post will most likely self destruct once Apple reads it!