Any way to boost the read speed on the WiFi Shield?

Hi all,
Been doing work with the official Arduino WiFi Shield connected to my Due. I've gotten it to work with the Due and IDE 1.5.3 after flashing the firmware on the shield, per the instructions on the WiFi playground page.

While my computer can send a large packet of data in a single burst, it seems that the read capabilities on the shield are severely limited. Is the "client.read()" method the only way to read the incoming data? That is horrible performance. Is there no buffered read, or buffer copy or something? There doesn't appear to be an externalized method to do this in the Library, but I'm wondering if I can modify the library to allow me to get direct access to the buffer and do it myself.

Thanks for any suggestions!