Airport Extreme cuts my speed in half

[MacCentric]

I have an older Airport Exreme, the first one with gigabit ports, and when I run my modem into it I get about 30 Mbit download speed, but when I remove it and plug the modem directly into my Mac I get 55Mbit speeds. Is this normal for these routers?

 

[ftaok]

I have an older Airport Exreme, the one with gigabit ports, and when I run my modem into it I get about 30 Mbit download speed, but when I remove it and plug the modem directly into my Mac I get 55Mbit speeds. Is this normal for these routers?

What do you get if you plug your Mac to your Airport using Ethernet? NOTE - I'm assuming that you're concerned with the connection speed when connected via wifi.

 

[MacCentric]

Good point, ethernet also achieves 55Mbit, so it's just the wifi part that's slower.
Looking at the airport, it shows Transmit Rate of 300, RSSI -39, MCS Index 15, this is using 5Ghz 802.11n. Not sure what's holding it up.

 

[ftaok]

I'm no expert at this and I'm jealous of your speeds ... both 55 and 30 are faster than my paltry 25.

Anyways, here are some things that I would try first.

1. change the channel to something else. maybe there's interference on that particular channel.

2. temporarily disable encryption to see if that's an issue.

3. make sure your computer isn't set for 11g speeds somehow.

4. try a computer to computer file transfer and measure or calculate the speeds.

5. make sure you have the latest firmware installed on the AEBS. NOTE - do a little research on this one first. I've heard people losing functionality after updating the firmware. Mainly high end (geeky) functions that Apple has taken out. Also note that I didn't fully understand the snippets that I've read as I'm not an expert and those functions didn't seem to bother me too much.