OS X Lion internet sharing is so slow on iPad

this, what you said (go to wifi option under it and change chanle to 1 put it on secutirty WPA 2 with password then start sharing), worked for me, though I forgot to change the ping. Interestingly on my iPad mini BOTH WIFI and bluetooth had suddenly started crawling on sharing interent from a macbookPro running 10.8.3 after they had been working fine. First bluetooth stopped being functional although connection was there. So I turned on WIFI which worked for a few hours and then also slowed to the point of being useless. I just tried your fix and BOTH are now back, so I'm back to using Bluetooth.

I just have to add. I just switched to OSX Mavericks and I have been using WEP encryption and my 95+ Mbps connection at my university was crawling over wifi to less than 15Mbps but it was stable, whereas the main wifi would often drop audio calls and such even though the speed was at least double. After switching to channel 1 and WPA2 my speeds shot up to well above 30Mbps down and 25 up and still stable. Thanks for the guidance.

Changing the channel of the repeated signal can be a big help in some situations.

I was using Internet Sharing on my Mac Mini (OSX 10.9) to repeat a relatively weak wifi signal ("source signal") for sharing with my iPhone and iPad ("repeated signal"). Each time I turned on sharing on the Mac Mini, the speed of the source signal on the Mac Mini dropped dramatically (as measured by speedtest.net). That messed up everything. If I turned off sharing, the speed of the source signal would return to normal.

The problem turned out to be that the transmission of the relatively strong repreated signal was interfering with the reception of the relatively weak source signal. They were using wifi channels which were too close together.

The fix was to set the wifi channel of the repeated signal to be as far away as possible from the wifi channel of the source signal.

Step 1: Determine Channel of the Source Signal

There are 3 ways I know of to determine the channel of the source signal:

1. If you're connecting to the source signal through the built-in wifi radio on your computer, hold down the "option" key while you click on the wifi icon in your toolbar (top right of screen).

2. If you're using wireless access point, you can usually find the channel in the access point's utility software (that's the software which you use to connect your access point to the internet).

3. If you have an Android device handy, you can run the Wifi Analyzer app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.farproc.wifi.analyzer&hl=en). This great free app shows you strengh and channels of all wifi signals at your location.

Step 2: Set Channel of the Repeated Signal

Once you know the channel of the source signal, just pick a channel for the repreated signal which is as different from it as possible.

Examples:

Source signal channel = 6; Repeated signal channel = 6; BAD

Source signal channel = 6; Repeated signal channel = 1; GOOD

You can set the wifi channel of the repeated signal like this: System Preferences => Sharing => To computers using Wi-Fi ("Internet Sharing" must of off, or you cannot access this) => Wi-Fi Options... => Channel.

Hope this helps.