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Don't expect high speeds on torrents. You depend on others for what they are prepared to send you. Additionally, it can take time to get up to speed since the torrent software usually favours those who upload too.
Don't saturate your upload bandwidth though, that will just cause everything to grind to a halt.
As for IP's whatever you connect to your modem needs to have a dynamic address, not static. If you want protection use a firewall either as software on your PC, or hardware via a router, that opens up ports specific to your torrent applications.