Why is tranferring files over Airport Extreme so slow?

samiwas · Oct 17, 2006

So I have wondered this since the day I got the thing several years ago (I'm sure this has been discussed...but I'm tired!)

The Airport Extreme is listed as being able to tranfer files at a speed of 54 Mbps, which if I did my calculations correectly is 6.5 MB/sec. Now, of course this is theoretical and not practical speed. But I have rarely, if ever, seen a tranfer speed between my two Macs of more than maybe a few hundred KB per second. Right now I'm transferring some files and it's going at about 150 KB/sec.

Is there maybe some setting that is not set right that would make the transfer go faster? It's painful to wait almost an hour for a 350MB file to transfer, when I can get files that size even off the net faster!!

Both computers have a full or almost full signal, so that's not it.

Ugh...back to the pain.

gloss · Oct 17, 2006

Are both your computers running 802.11g Wireless? If either one of them is on B instead, you'll max out at 11mbps.

samiwas · Oct 17, 2006

Thanks gloss!

You are correct...the second computer is plain airport, not extreme. Still, it should be faster than 50-100K per second, but I'm sure that is a big part of it.

weldon · Oct 17, 2006

Another thing to keep in mind is that both computers will be going through the Airport Extreme base station. Max throughput is probably close to 5Mbps, but then divide that in half because the one mac is sending to the access point and then the access point is retransmitting to the second mac. There is only so much bandwidth available in the spectrum used by 802.11b and the transfer is slowing down as the computers and the access point negotiate who gets to send and receive in turn.

You would probably see better results if you turned off the access point and set up a ad-hoc wireless network directly between the two macs.

thewhitehart · Oct 18, 2006

weldon said:
You would probably see better results if you turned off the access point and set up a ad-hoc wireless network directly between the two macs.

That's a great idea. I had the same problem. I just ditched the effort and hooked up my firewire cable and booted into target disk mode.

Sesshi · Oct 18, 2006

For lots of reasons you'll never get the full wireless speed. If you need real speed gigabit or Firewire is the only way to go.

samiwas · Oct 18, 2006

Thanks for all the replies. The two computers are on two floors of the house, so firewire and ethernet won't really work (and the ethernet port doesn't work on one laptop). I will try out the computer-to-computer network and see how that does.

Thanks!!

Sam

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Why is tranferring files over Airport Extreme so slow?

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