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Airport Express Performance

patseguin

patseguin

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 28, 2003
1,752
555
I recently went wireless and installed an Airport Extreme card in my G5 and bought an Airport Express. I plugged in the antenna lead and noticed that there was some other wire right by the plug. Is that supposed to be used for something? My signal strength is usually at max and my download speeds seem to be OK. When I play World of Warcraft, however, the latency link is always red and everything is laggy. I bypassed the Airport and plugged my cable modem right into my G5 and downloads and web pages seemed faster and the link in WoW was a constant green. Is there some kind of known performance problem with the Airport Express? Before this, I always played wirelessly on my PC laptop with no problems via my M$ Wireless Base Station.
 
Wireless will always be lagging, compared to wire... it's because your data are being packed and unpacked more times and encryption and decryption also takes some time...

Using Airtunes the lag is sometimes approaching 10 seconds from my iBook, but as it's just music I don't really care... ;)
 
Mitthrawnuruodo said:
Wireless will always be lagging, compared to wire... it's because your data are being packed and unpacked more times and encryption and decryption also takes some time...

Using Airtunes the lag is sometimes approaching 10 seconds from my iBook, but as it's just music I don't really care... ;)
Click to expand...

Yeah, but like I said, I had NO lag when I used my laptop with the Microsoft Wireless Base Station. I'm beginning to think that the AE has some problems.
 
patseguin said:
Yeah, but like I said, I had NO lag when I used my laptop with the Microsoft Wireless Base Station. I'm beginning to think that the AE has some problems.
Click to expand...
Well, the (enormous) Airtunes lag, I mentioned, just might be an indication that you maybe have a point... ;)

Also which encryption scheme did the M$ base use...? You should get less lag if you turn off encryption, but of course from a safety point of view this is NOT recommended...
 
The delay you see with Airtunes is not network "lag" per se, it's buffering the music.

As for WoW, my guess is that it's a router issue, not a wireless issue. Try forwarding the ports recommended by Blizzard.
 
I have to second what dzavitz said - you shouldn't be seeing any network lag at all. The only people who should see lag are the ones who are using two-way satellite internet connections, because of the 45K mile round trip distance for the signals.

Wireless will be slower than wired, for sure - but that's not the same thing. You'll notice that in your transfer rates, not your response times.

I've currently got one Airport Extreme and two Airport Express, and they work quite well for me - as well as the D-Link router I had before them.
 
Well, I changed a setting in the Airport Express and WoW performed fine for a while and then went to super-lag. I discounted the AE and plugged back in my Microsoft Base Station and got the same thing. Finally, I connected my base station to the Mac via ethernet and it was back to normal. Is it the Airport Extreme card that is the piece of junk? My Windows laptop has NO problems with download speeds or lag in WoW.
 
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