Airport Extreme oddness

[rbrian]

I have a brand new Airport Extreme, which is behaving weirdly...

First up, my Macbook Air connects to the Extreme at 120Mb, as does my Mac mini, and both of those connect to the internet at 12Mb according to speedtest.net, which is close enough to the 14Mb down 1Mb up my ISP supplied modem/router reports.

My iPhone 5, however, connects at 53Mb, but speedtest.net gives a ping of 300ms, 0Mb download, but a healthy enough 0.9Mb upload.

In trying to fix this, I disable DHCP and wireless on the modem/router (a BT Home Hub 3), enabled DHCP and NAT on the Extreme, which gave a double NAT error, but seems to work ok.

Now, the iPhone gets 75 ms ping and 0.88Mb download, on the same 5Ghz network and in the same place as the Macbook Air, both of which show a full signal, while the Air gets 75 ms ping and 12.5Mb download.

Further investigation is complicated by the fact that the Airport Utility on my Air can no longer find the Extreme, while the Airport Utility on my iPhone can.

 

[blueroom]

I believe the iOS devices including iPhone are single channel WiFi only (150). Your MacBook has dual antennas (bonding 300) and the very newest devices are triple (450)

http://tidbits.com/article/13353

 

[bmcgrath]

iPhone 5 and iPads connect to 5ghz. Are you getting rubbish speeds on both bands?

 

[rbrian]

After much more mucking about, it all seems to work now. The different speeds I was seeing for different devices turned out not to be related to the devices, all of them fluctuated severely. The solution was to turn off the wifi and DHCP on my BT Home Hub, and connect the Airport Extreme to port 4, the only gigabit port.

I was having problems with the Home Hub before, which is the main reason I got the Airport. I thought the problem was congestion on the 2.4GHz band (I can always see at least 15 other networks), but it seems like it's something more fundamental. My ISP is sending me a new one, so I'll see what that does.

Is it possible to disable 2.4GHz on the Airport Extreme and only use 5GHz?

 

[bmcgrath]

You have to use both bands.

 

[Giuly]

I believe the iOS devices including iPhone are single channel WiFi only (150). Your MacBook has dual antennas (bonding 300) and the very newest devices are triple (450)

http://tidbits.com/article/13353

Actually, the iPhones are 65MBit/s max (1x1:1 MIMO, 20MHz wide), with the 4th-gen iPad being the first to support 150MBit/s via 40Mhz wide channel on 5GHz networks.