Why do torrents not get capped for me? How do apartment firewalls work

[crewxp]

Hey. I have a couple of q's that hopefully someone may know. I live in an apartment complex with a fiber connection to the complex. I'm supposed to be receiving 8Mbit down and 8 Mbit up speeds.

1.) I only receive up to 2 Mb/s down and 6 Mb/s upload speeds when I run speed test. The tech support can't figure out why. I'm not running anything else. Any hints I can look at to see what's wrong? (Check for a bad switch etc)

2.) My torrents receive up to 2 MegaBYTE/s download. They don't seem to be limited my my 8 Mb/s download cap. Is there a reason for this? Does it use a different connection type?

3.) How do apartment complex's firewalls usually work? Do I have a open NAT when I use programs or am I using the same ip as everyone else? Can I check to see if my NAT is open? My xbox games lag like crazy when I play, but when I speed test during a game, I receive around 1-2 Mb/s, which should be plenty for xbox speeds.

Thanks! Just curious on all this.

[Kloschüssel]

1] hard to tell without knowing the infrastructure

2] well, if you can't get past 2mbit as hinted in 1, why should torrents download faster?

3] there are possible two cases:
3.1] you have a public ip
that means your modem/router/computer is accessible from the internet and you don't need any NAT
3.2] you're in a subnet
therefore you don't have a public ip and most probably the modem/router does not NAT packets for you as long as you ain't the authority that manages the routing device
Either way, huge bandwidth doesn't necessarily mean that your packets are routed fast. If you ping a website (for example a google) and the answers come in constantly fast (<120ms), you're fine. If it jumps around (i.e. one time 30ms and the other above 120ms) someone else is probably "stealing" bandwidth. If it is constantly slow (above 120ms) you've got a connection problem that has to be solved by either your network administrator or the ISP.